March 2007
In its own way, frost may be one of the most beautiful things to happen in your garden all year . . . Don't miss it. Like all true beauty, it is fleeting. It will grace your garden for but a short while this morning. . . . For this moment, embrace frost as the beautiful gift that it is.
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.
One way to keep crows out of the corn patch is to plant rhubarb instead.
Sleet, incidentally, is the worst five-letter four-letter word I know.
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
That's why it's good to have family or old friends. They keep you from becoming a prisoner of your own obsessions. The world is wide, there are other pleasures in it besides gardening, and sometimes we gardeners just need to have that pointed out to us.
To many gardeners, seed catalogues are the most accurate depiction we have of the Garden from which humans were expelled.
April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Here is a landscape pronouncement of possibly dubious value: Any ilex ought to be planted in front of or below windows for winter beauty, simply because you stare out of windows so much during that season.
If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
That is the beauty of reading seed catalogues while the next snowstorm approaches. We seed in an imaginary spring, weed in an imaginary summer, harvest in an imaginary fall.
There is something about a garden that brings out a fiercely possessive streak in the best of us. All our triumphs, to be really satisfying, must stem from our own individual efforts; and we look with a cold eye upon innovations for which we are not personally responsible. Even a suggestion, however tactfully introduced, is not always taken in good part. . . . We gardeners should not be blamed for this defensive attitude, which is based on the intense interest we take in our work. Without it, gardening would become an undertaking so laborious, so frustrating, so maddening, that there would soon be no gardens at all. As with all truly creative pursuits, the appeal is to the mind and to the heart, rather than to the pocket; and unless we can convince ourselves, beyond any doubt, that the credit is ours, and ours alone, we are like a singer listening to the applause for a song that someone else has sung.
