May 2008

Gardening is never risk free. It's not risk free in your first year and it's not risk free in your 40th. . . .There's always another strange spin on the ball. There's always more to learn.

It therefore became a storage shed, which simply meant a place to put anything you could not find a place for otherwise.

In the end, this may be the most important thing about frost: Frost slows us down. In spring, it tempers our eagerness. In fall, it brings closure and rest. In our gotta-go world--where every nanosecond seems to count--slowness can be a great gift. So rather than see Jack Frost as an adversary, you could choose to greet him as a friend.

Now, nobody imagines his modest little patch is going to be the greatest thing since copper bracelets, no. But it will be personal, and it will be fascinating, because there is no such thing as dullness when the gardener is going full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes, as it were.

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

Aren't our gardens assembled fragments of our dreams and daydreams, our memories, images, and visions, remembrances of times past, fantasies, pieces of paradise we try to re-create?