Book reviews

. . . 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.

But gardeners do not dwell too long on catastrophe. Failure is an accepted part of daily life and we value our successes the more.

A garden raised from seed is a garden raised in the heart, the gardener growing along with the garden.

I cannot live without a rose, especially a climbing or rambling rose, for just one truss tumbling in the right spot can be like that last long feather on a hat, a nonchalant sweep that lifts a perfectly acceptable design to another level, a throwaway gesture that means nothing and everything.

Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration.

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.

Optimism overrules pessimism because every spring is an opportunity to start again.

I think you need to be possessed to farm, you have to have a calling.

Good gardening is very simple, really. You just have to learn to think like a plant.

There is nothing like pruning a grapevine for training oneself to think like a plant.

There is very little in gardening that benefits from being done quickly, and weeding teaches the virtues of pace as well as any activity.

We have to stand still in a garden and listen to its rhythms, look for the signs and symbols and meanings, hear its utterances. We have to look down and up, notice the needles and the haystacks.

This is what the true gardener expects. He knows that 'gardening is eleven months of hard work and one month of disappointment.'

But a garden is somewhat exalted above ordinary notions of correctness. A garden is more than a matter of the right fish fork, as it were.