April 2007
April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common.
Nowhere but at home are the flowers the most colorful and the scents the sweetest.
Gardening is the most profound and complex of the arts, operating not just inessentially or marginally through time, but deliberately and consciously. What makes a garden great is the tension between the dimensions, between what is structurally permanent and what is temporarily, immediately, imposed upon that structure.
It is one of the peculiarities of garden-making, the greatest of all the arts, that there are no "great" gardens made by welfare recipients …
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
And it's a sign of age I think, that I start the day planning to get 5 things done, end it with getting 2 things done, and end up feeling like I've done 12 things.
And though one has begun to search for signs of spring almost since January, and to receive them, like postcards sent on a long voyage to home, it is with the greening of the grass that spring has, finally, certainly arrived.
The pleasure of gardening is often measured by the amount of weeding you don't have to do.
I had to remember that I was only the referee, the human being who weeded and pinched back and watched everything grow. If I was patient and paid close attention, perennials would let me know where they wanted to be.
Sometimes survival in compost piles has a way of glorifying a plant you thought you hated.
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.
In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.
