Colchicums
A garden raised from seed is a garden raised in the heart, the gardener growing along with the garden.
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
No garden is a natural thing, of course, and people who garden as a way of getting in touch with Nature are actually only getting in touch with fantasy. Gardens are, by definition, contrived.
I don't mean to complain about my own garden. It serves me and satisfies me quite well, except at the moments when I get into despair over it: very frequent moments, when I long to have some other sort of garden, quite different; a garden in Spain, a garden in Italy, a garden in Provence, a garden in Scotland.
This is the essence of gardening. Looking forward, planning ahead, feeling as if you are wresting the garden from the grasp of its fatigue. It seems trite to mention it, but fall bed work bestows an enormous amount of pride and sense of accomplishment. It lifts the blues of a brutal year and fills a long winter with the joys of a new spring.
I'm always pleased when the garden is neat and tidy. That's when it looks like a garden. Nature is plants and the complicated ecosystems that support them. But even the most natural of gardens is an unnatural arrangement of plants. We stamp our will upon the landscape, even those of us who prefer to work with nature. And often, like this weekend, nature stamps back. Maybe it's that dramatic tension between artfulness and chaos that keeps us coming back to the garden. Or maybe it's just the flowers and blue skies and finding two little snakes under a rock.
It's the gardener's job to choose those that will thrive in his or her climate, rather than trying to force the plants to grow where they're not well suited.
That's why it's good to have family or old friends. They keep you from becoming a prisoner of your own obsessions. The world is wide, there are other pleasures in it besides gardening, and sometimes we gardeners just need to have that pointed out to us.
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Gardening is only a refined form of gambling, after all. Sometimes the odds are fearfully against us; sometimes we win; but once the passion seizes us we are the victims of its fascination for life.
This is the essence of gardening. Looking forward, planning ahead, feeling as if you are wresting the garden from the grasp of its fatigue. It seems trite to mention it, but fall bed work bestows an enormous amount of pride and sense of accomplishment. It lifts the blues of a brutal year and fills a long winter with the joys of a new spring.
To many gardeners, seed catalogues are the most accurate depiction we have of the Garden from which humans were expelled.
I am aware that I have a genetic tendency towards a garden of nothing but Zinnias -- a combination of frugality, laziness, and weakness in the face of all that flash. . . . Knowing what can happen, I restrained myself around the zinnias and didn't pick a single coneflower head.
