After record-breaking cold temperatures rocked the region this winter, Bobbie Nasif was happy on a warm, sunny Friday afternoon to be back in her garden now that spring is officially here.

“It’s just one of the most rewarding things,” she said. “It’s always fascinated me that you can plant a little tiny seed and it just grows. It’s magical.”

Nasif, 82, has been gardening her entire life, she said, and doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t garden or read, her two passions.

“If you have a library and a garden, you don’t need anything else,” Nasif said.

Indeed as you walk up the sloped driveway to her home, it’s impossible not to notice that she is an avid gardener. Flowers fill the beds, along with a half dozen varieties of shrubs and ground covers. Inside, bookshelves line almost every wall of the home, all filled to the brim with books on every imaginable topic, but especially gardening.

Nasif blames her passion on her father, who was a farmer himself. She and one of her sisters both inherited his green thumb, and she has passed it onto many of her five children and fifteen grandchildren as well.

“I love the earth, I love to dig in it,” she said. “If the sun’s shining I’ve got to be digging.”

While spring is the prettiest time of the year and best for gardening, there’s plenty of things that have to be taken care of year-round if you want to keep your yard looking its best, Nasif said. Just for her hundreds of tulips in the front garden, she has to order them in July, get them shipped to her in October and plant them a couple of weeks before Christmas.

“There’s always something to do. You prune, you rake leaves, you mulch, you plant and you dig up,” she said. “But you can’t really take credit for it … you’re just God’s gardener.”

Gardening has always been a constant in her life, she said. While everything else in the world may change around her, she knows exactly what she needs to do when she walks out into her yard, the only thing that’s changed is that she’s gotten more experience with age. When a doctor told her once that she should cut back on her gardening for health reasons, she tried it for a while. After two or three weeks of staying inside and away from her yard, she couldn’t take it anymore.

“I said the heck with this, if I’m going out I’m going out happy.”