December 2008

If the garden was a secret and we could get into it we could watch the things grow bigger every day, and see how many roses are alive. Don't you see? Oh, don't you see how much nicer it would be if it was a secret?

But here experience speaks: never be too far away from man or machine until the sweep of the last [Bobcat] blade, for those who have watched these men at work will know about the amazing interpretations of a plan that can occur.

I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.

She calls herself a 'general gardener' because she grows everything and loves everything that grows.

. . . 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.

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.

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.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.