October 2007

I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.

Time for the weather report. It's cold out folks. Bonecrushing cold. The kind of cold which will wrench the spirit out of a young man, or forge it into steel.

The Alexanders of this world who find nations easily conquered should come up against the California annual wild flower seed. It gives you pause: who's the boss? If you need to be boss, stick to nasturtiums and marigolds.

Every spring offers another chance to undo the damage done by winter and finally get the garden right.

. . . the full double [peonies], very like dahlias that have gone to heaven and been transformed.

We're all experts in the garden, right up until the moment that we're not. . . .Every single time you try a new crop or new variety or new plot, you risk failure. Even with the tried and true, a year of strange weather can make decades of experience meaningless.

Fortunately, by the thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth year or thereabouts, the gardener strikes that balance by which he has the best of all seasons. By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course.

. . . the full double [peonies], very like dahlias that have gone to heaven and been transformed.

In my part of the country, there comes each year one long and occasionally fruitful season when gardening takes places strictly on paper and in the imagination.