Colchicums

We're all experts in the garden, right up until the moment that we're not. . . .Every single time you try a new crop or new variety or new plot, you risk failure. Even with the tried and true, a year of strange weather can make decades of experience meaningless.

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.

In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.

The biggest crocuses are also excellent for gardeners who fear they are themselves getting almost too refined to breathe.

Roses are at their best trailing down in graceful trusses. In fact, they are like supermodels--the goods just look better displayed on tall, thin, limbs.

Snowdrops provide the intermezzo between winter and spring.

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

It is not a bad thing for plants to express individualism. Not everyone can be a marigold.

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.

It will never rain roses. When we want to have more roses, we must plant more.

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

. . . Whoever it was who said Nature made no mistakes in colour harmony was either colour-blind or a sentimentalist. Nature makes the most hideous mistakes; and it is up to us gardeners to control and correct them.

myrmecochory: seed dispersal by ants.