Judy Miller
April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.
Gardening at first felt like a natural pleasure, and then it became a necessary one.
I am aware that I have a genetic tendency towards a garden of nothing but Zinnias -- a combination of frugality, laziness, and weakness in the face of all that flash. . . . Knowing what can happen, I restrained myself around the zinnias and didn't pick a single coneflower head.
Not everyone has the personality to have a public farm.
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
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment. It bursts upon a man every year . . . as though it had never happened before, but had just been shown by God how to do it, and tried, and found the impossible possible.
Low maintenance is for homeowners, not gardeners!
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.
Only I, who live in the tropic of fancy, could be under the apocalypse of snow and ice that is Iowa and not admit that winter really exists.
It should be said, though without any intention of adding to the world’s already adequate store of guilt, that the average gardener is surprisingly lazy and, not to split hairs about it, pig-headed.
To many gardeners, seed catalogues are the most accurate depiction we have of the Garden from which humans were expelled.
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.
