Talitha Purdy
Seeing a plant that you have known only in catalogues is like recognizing a celebrity in a crowd.
Intensive gardening, biodynamic bed-building, and every other gardening technique will seriously insult your imagination if you follow every step blindly. Every gardener should experiment and adapt.
. . . A bunch of daisies has a peculiarly earthy smell, especially when it comes as a hot little gift in the hand of a child.
Gardening is not some sort of game by which one proves his superiority over others, nor is it a marketplace for the display of elegant things that others cannot afford. It is, on the contrary, a growing work of creation, endless in its changing elements. It is not a monument or an achievement, but a sort of traveling, a kind of pilgrimage you might say, often a bit grubby and sweaty though true pilgrims do not mind that. A garden is not a picture, but a language, which is of course the major art of life.
…the shivery perfection that winter can bring to our gardens.
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.
All of longtime gardeners are guilty of experiencing our own irrational, unprovable revelations about what works in the garden.
The two most mysterious aspects of clematis are, How is the word pronounced? and, What is its plural form? Once these questions are answered, growing the plants is plain sailing.
Snowdrops provide the intermezzo between winter and spring.
The garden was all in blue and gold, blue was the color of his wife's eyes and gold the color of her hair.
It is a great joy the day we discover that we can learn things without having to make the mistake ourselves.
Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration.
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
