Lynda Lowman

But along the way we really do learn that marigolds gain enormously in impact when used as sparingly as ultimatums.

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.

Pruning is an art and a science. The rules are simple, but putting them into practice requires skill and judgment. Looking around, I gather that almost everyone leaves the job to an unskilled yardman with years of inexperience.

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.

Speaking of extreme environments, garden-making in Greenland is said by gardeners there to require tamaviaartumik, Greenlandic for passion, ambition, and commitment.

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.

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.