September 2008

Gardening is the most profound and complex of the arts, operating not just inessentially or marginally through time, but deliberately and consciously. What makes a garden great is the tension between the dimensions, between what is structurally permanent and what is temporarily, immediately, imposed upon that structure.

Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.

Optimism overrules pessimism because every spring is an opportunity to start again.

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

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

Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature's tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame a garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.

Fantasy makes all gardens grow. Without it you may have yard, plot, park, grounds, but you lack the essential ingredient of garden, the element that seizes the imagination and transports or envelops you into a world invented by the gardener.

Good gardening is very simple, really. You just have to learn to think like a plant.

There is nothing like pruning a grapevine for training oneself to think like a plant.

Improbability is not a quality we value in landscapes.