Mailbag
Every spring offers another chance to undo the damage done by winter and finally get the garden right.
There is nothing better to cure a wicked case of self obsession that a good dose of fresh air and dirty work.
In its own way, frost may be one of the most beautiful things to happen in your garden all year . . . Don't miss it. Like all true beauty, it is fleeting. It will grace your garden for but a short while this morning. . . . For this moment, embrace frost as the beautiful gift that it is.
To imagine a garden paradise, one must live in one's home and listen to its music. . . . Delicious, blissful pleasure is derived from the garden's use as a continuation of the home.
The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing better than they have ever done before.
In its own way, frost may be one of the most beautiful things to happen in your garden all year . . . Don't miss it. Like all true beauty, it is fleeting. It will grace your garden for but a short while this morning. . . . For this moment, embrace frost as the beautiful gift that it is.
And we learned this important lesson: Never, ever plant anything that is supposed to look like something else. It won't.
It should be said, though without any intention of adding to the world’s already adequate store of guilt, that the average gardener is surprisingly lazy and, not to split hairs about it, pig-headed.
Fantasy makes all gardens grow. Without it you may have yard, plot, park, grounds, but you lack the essential ingredient of garden, the element that seizes the imagination and transports or envelops you into a world invented by the gardener.
Some might say a calendar is a simple construct that allows us to divide and conquer. But I prefer to think of each little numbered square as the reminder to bite off only what I can chew and savor.
Despite these losses and setbacks, like King Sisyphus, gardeners forever keep rolling that rock up the hill, convinced we are progressing toward the day it will stay in place up there and not roll back on us, the day our gardens will be just as we want them.
For the uninitiated, the reality of what it takes to create and maintain a great-looking garden appears to be an endless string of tiresome tasks and dirty jobs. But true gardeners know that the real fun of gardening in in the process--the planning, the planting, the nurturing, and the learning.
It is a great joy the day we discover that we can learn things without having to make the mistake ourselves.
