September 2004

Every spring offers another chance to undo the damage done by winter and finally get the garden right.

A garden is half-made when it is well planned. The best gardener is the one who does the most gardening by the winter fire.

In the end, this may be the most important thing about frost: Frost slows us down. In spring, it tempers our eagerness. In fall, it brings closure and rest. In our gotta-go world--where every nanosecond seems to count--slowness can be a great gift. So rather than see Jack Frost as an adversary, you could choose to greet him as a friend.

The trouble with master plans in gardens, then, is simply that they do not take into account masterful plants. Nor addled masters.

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

. . . some gardens are more fantastic than others, and a very few are so fantastic that they seem to be more about fantasy than about gardening. Like a play within a play, these gardens comment on the nature of illusion, the mechanics of mesmerization, the mystery of why and how the simple act of cordoning off space and time can charge them so highly with meaning.

Seeing a plant that you have known only in catalogues is like recognizing a celebrity in a crowd.

Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment. It bursts upon a man every year . . . as though it had never happened before, but had just been shown by God how to do it, and tried, and found the impossible possible.

Pruning is an art and a science. The rules are simple, but putting them into practice requires skill and judgment. Looking around, I gather that almost everyone leaves the job to an unskilled yardman with years of inexperience.

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

It isn’t that I don’t like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.

Good gardening is very simple, really. You just have to learn to think like a plant.

There is nothing like pruning a grapevine for training oneself to think like a plant.

Working the soil brings me back to my own nature, as I now understand that tending a garden is the same as taking care of myself.