Native/Invasive

She calls herself a 'general gardener' because she grows everything and loves everything that grows.

In my part of the country, there comes each year one long and occasionally fruitful season when gardening takes places strictly on paper and in the imagination.

But gardening is the art of the frustratingly imaginable, of triumph against ridiculous odds, and even rock-gardeners, devoted to the cult and cultivation of the nearly-invisible, must sometimes dream grandiosely.

Like longtime parents, longtime gardeners learn when to fret and when to shrug.

This is how it should be with gardens and gardeners. They should love what they own, and own what they love; but their gardens must never own them, for there will be no pleasure in them if they do.

A garden is a lovely thing
But gardens are not made
By saying "Oh how beautiful"
And sitting in the shade!

No real garden should ever show bare earth, much less a sea of bark mulch, which always represents both an opportunity lost and a failure of horticultural seriousness.

Men with trucks do not see new plantings when reversing or unloading, so trees must wait [to be planted] until all hard landscaping is done.

What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all.

…the shivery perfection that winter can bring to our gardens.

Intensive gardening, biodynamic bed-building, and every other gardening technique will seriously insult your imagination if you follow every step blindly. Every gardener should experiment and adapt.

That is the beauty of reading seed catalogues while the next snowstorm approaches. We seed in an imaginary spring, weed in an imaginary summer, harvest in an imaginary fall.

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