May 2006

It takes exact amounts of rain, light, and heat for buds to open together and result in a few days of rare beauty. It might also, I was startled to realize, take more hours of gardening to create an ideal combination than the number of hours it lasted, but that was of little importance to me. After all, by then I had become a gardener.

Behind every bloom-filled border is a grubby, sweaty gardener with muddy knees, chipped fingernails, and sore muscles--and a big smile, too.

The garden was all in blue and gold, blue was the color of his wife's eyes and gold the color of her hair.

It will never rain roses. When we want to have more roses, we must plant more.

Gardening may well be one of the world's most important fantasies.

Fantasy makes all gardens grow. Without it you may have yard, plot, park, grounds, but you lack the essential ingredient of garden, the element that seizes the imagination and transports or envelops you into a world invented by the gardener.

'I have had almost every rose that you can grow,' she says, 'and some died, but at least I have made their acquaintance.'

All of longtime gardeners are guilty of experiencing our own irrational, unprovable revelations about what works in the garden.