June 2007

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

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

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

I'm always pleased when the garden is neat and tidy. That's when it looks like a garden. Nature is plants and the complicated ecosystems that support them. But even the most natural of gardens is an unnatural arrangement of plants. We stamp our will upon the landscape, even those of us who prefer to work with nature. And often, like this weekend, nature stamps back. Maybe it's that dramatic tension between artfulness and chaos that keeps us coming back to the garden. Or maybe it's just the flowers and blue skies and finding two little snakes under a rock.

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.

Gardening is only a refined form of gambling, after all. Sometimes the odds are fearfully against us; sometimes we win; but once the passion seizes us we are the victims of its fascination for life.

. . . 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.

[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.