April 2008

It takes exact amounts of rain, light, and heat for buds to open together and result in a few days of rare beauty. It might also, I was startled to realize, take more hours of gardening to create an ideal combination than the number of hours it lasted, but that was of little importance to me. After all, by then I had become a gardener.

. . . We gardeners needn't have a siege mentality toward frost. It's not a villain, holding us hostage in some pitifully short growing season. Jack Frost is simply one more character in this dazzling, sometimes perplexing, and wonderfully rewarding practice we call gardening.

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.

Behind every bloom-filled border is a grubby, sweaty gardener with muddy knees, chipped fingernails, and sore muscles--and a big smile, too.

This is what the true gardener expects. He knows that 'gardening is eleven months of hard work and one month of disappointment.'

Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration.

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.

What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all.

Behind every bloom-filled border is a grubby, sweaty gardener with muddy knees, chipped fingernails, and sore muscles--and a big smile, too.