March 2006
I cannot live without a rose, especially a climbing or rambling rose, for just one truss tumbling in the right spot can be like that last long feather on a hat, a nonchalant sweep that lifts a perfectly acceptable design to another level, a throwaway gesture that means nothing and everything.
The biggest crocuses are also excellent for gardeners who fear they are themselves getting almost too refined to breathe.
Intensive gardening, biodynamic bed-building, and every other gardening technique will seriously insult your imagination if you follow every step blindly. Every gardener should experiment and adapt.
It soon becomes clear to the gardener, who has probably started out to achieve a certain bloom, that the cycle of life in the plant is a good bit more enjoyable than the bloom itself.
...if it weren't for the New York State agricultural exemption, the family farm couldn't exist.
One of the things childhood is is a process of learning about the various paths that lead out of nature and into culture, and the garden contains many of these.
It's Human Nature, or at least a gardener's nature (which is not quite the same thing), to want to live at least one and preferably two climatic zones warmer than where he gardens
Garden math has always seemed a bit like using MapQuest to find Nirvana.
'I have had almost every rose that you can grow,' she says, 'and some died, but at least I have made their acquaintance.'
Men with trucks do not see new plantings when reversing or unloading, so trees must wait [to be planted] until all hard landscaping is done.
[Colchicums] are sort of like the nuts in my cookies... I don't think about them a lot, but I'd certainly miss them if they weren't there.
For the uninitiated, the reality of what it takes to create and maintain a great-looking garden appears to be an endless string of tiresome tasks and dirty jobs. But true gardeners know that the real fun of gardening in in the process--the planning, the planting, the nurturing, and the learning.
There is of course no such thing as a green thumb. Gardening is a vocation like any other--a calling, if you like, but not a gift from heaven. One acquires the necessary skills and knowledge to do it successfully, or one doesn't.
