Kathy Purdy
All of longtime gardeners are guilty of experiencing our own irrational, unprovable revelations about what works in the garden.
The biggest crocuses are also excellent for gardeners who fear they are themselves getting almost too refined to breathe.
The garden was all in blue and gold, blue was the color of his wife's eyes and gold the color of her hair.
A garden raised from seed is a garden raised in the heart, the gardener growing along with the garden.
You always carry the memory of your garden in your heart. No matter where on earth you are . . . some mysterious tie will always bind you to your very own patch of soil.
This morning the sun and warmth have gone, a sleety rain is making it difficult to be outside, so I have made a list of the fall jobs. . . . The list that I gradually compile is long, but in order to give myself a sense of accomplishment, I include one or two jobs that I have already done.
Men with trucks do not see new plantings when reversing or unloading, so trees must wait [to be planted] until all hard landscaping is done.
But gardening is the art of the frustratingly imaginable, of triumph against ridiculous odds, and even rock-gardeners, devoted to the cult and cultivation of the nearly-invisible, must sometimes dream grandiosely.
The biggest crocuses are also excellent for gardeners who fear they are themselves getting almost too refined to breathe.
'I have had almost every rose that you can grow,' she says, 'and some died, but at least I have made their acquaintance.'
Like longtime parents, longtime gardeners learn when to fret and when to shrug.
. . . some gardens are more fantastic than others, and a very few are so fantastic that they seem to be more about fantasy than about gardening. Like a play within a play, these gardens comment on the nature of illusion, the mechanics of mesmerization, the mystery of why and how the simple act of cordoning off space and time can charge them so highly with meaning.
They should look pretty together, if only my scheme comes off. Alas, how seldom do these little schemes come off. Something will go wrong; some puppy will bury a bone; some mouse will eat the bulbs; some mole will heave the daphnes and the lilac out of the ground. Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.
