Plant info

To visit a garden properly is a demanding business; most visitors simply don't have the time.

The garden and gardener have grown alongside each other over the years, each shaping the other.

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

Improbability is not a quality we value in landscapes.

Fortunately, by the thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth year or thereabouts, the gardener strikes that balance by which he has the best of all seasons. By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course.

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

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

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

Marcescence is the retention of dead plant organs that normally are shed. It is most obvious in deciduous trees that retain leaves through the winter. Several trees normally have marcescent leaves such as oak (Quercus), beech (Fagus) and hornbeam (Carpinus).

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.

A garden is a private world or it is nothing, and the gardener must be allowed his vagaries.

...if it weren't for the New York State agricultural exemption, the family farm couldn't exist.

There are two difficulties with ground covers: first to get them to grow, and then to get them not to.