December 2007

[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.

I am very fond of the Spring-flowering colchicums, but unfortunately slugs are also, and those greedy gastropods and I have a race for who can see the flower-buds first. If I win I go out after dark with an acetylene lamp and a hatpin and spear the little army of slugs making for a tea party at the sign of the Colchicum.

Garden math has always seemed a bit like using MapQuest to find Nirvana.

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.

For the uninitiated, the reality of what it takes to create and maintain a great-looking garden appears to be an endless string of tiresome tasks and dirty jobs. But true gardeners know that the real fun of gardening in in the process--the planning, the planting, the nurturing, and the learning.

It isn’t that I don’t like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.

Gardeners always delight in doing something that another gardener says can't be done.

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.