June 2008

Gardens are like those extraordinary Faberge eggs made for the czars, revealing surprise after surprise as the season progresses, each week showing some new wonder.

Forsythia is a sheer joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia.

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.

It's Human Nature, or at least a gardener's nature (which is not quite the same thing), to want to live at least one and preferably two climatic zones warmer than where he gardens

In its own way, frost may be one of the most beautiful things to happen in your garden all year . . . Don't miss it. Like all true beauty, it is fleeting. It will grace your garden for but a short while this morning. . . . For this moment, embrace frost as the beautiful gift that it is.

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

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.

But gardeners do not dwell too long on catastrophe. Failure is an accepted part of daily life and we value our successes the more.