Rosemarie Hanson

Winter is the icicle in the soul of the gardener.

I could not do without a Syringa [mockorange], for the sake of Cowper's Line.

Artichokes are no fools.

Now, nobody imagines his modest little patch is going to be the greatest thing since copper bracelets, no. But it will be personal, and it will be fascinating, because there is no such thing as dullness when the gardener is going full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes, as it were.

It therefore became a storage shed, which simply meant a place to put anything you could not find a place for otherwise.

Garden math has always seemed a bit like using MapQuest to find Nirvana.

Here is a landscape pronouncement of possibly dubious value: Any ilex ought to be planted in front of or below windows for winter beauty, simply because you stare out of windows so much during that season.

A garden is half-made when it is well planned. The best gardener is the one who does the most gardening by the winter fire.

When dealing with frost it is always best to be paranoid. In the spring never think it is too late for one more frost to come. And in the fall never think it too early.

There is something about a garden that brings out a fiercely possessive streak in the best of us. All our triumphs, to be really satisfying, must stem from our own individual efforts; and we look with a cold eye upon innovations for which we are not personally responsible. Even a suggestion, however tactfully introduced, is not always taken in good part. . . . We gardeners should not be blamed for this defensive attitude, which is based on the intense interest we take in our work. Without it, gardening would become an undertaking so laborious, so frustrating, so maddening, that there would soon be no gardens at all. As with all truly creative pursuits, the appeal is to the mind and to the heart, rather than to the pocket; and unless we can convince ourselves, beyond any doubt, that the credit is ours, and ours alone, we are like a singer listening to the applause for a song that someone else has sung.

That is the beauty of reading seed catalogues while the next snowstorm approaches. We seed in an imaginary spring, weed in an imaginary summer, harvest in an imaginary fall.

It takes exact amounts of rain, light, and heat for buds to open together and result in a few days of rare beauty. It might also, I was startled to realize, take more hours of gardening to create an ideal combination than the number of hours it lasted, but that was of little importance to me. After all, by then I had become a gardener.

In a lot of ways, I'm just hitting my stride, just a little more tired while striding.