Plant info

You can't grow what you don't have, even if it won't grow when you have it.

[Colchicums] are sort of like the nuts in my cookies... I don't think about them a lot, but I'd certainly miss them if they weren't there.

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 hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.

Every gardener has a strange and romantic tale to tell, if you can worm it out of him – of blue flowers that came up yellow, or of a white lily that sinned in the night and greeted the dawn with crimson cheeks. In the strong heart of every gardener, some wild secret stirs.

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.

And we learned this important lesson: Never, ever plant anything that is supposed to look like something else. It won't.

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.

Sleet, incidentally, is the worst five-letter four-letter word I know.

. . . We gardeners needn't have a siege mentality toward frost. It's not a villain, holding us hostage in some pitifully short growing season. Jack Frost is simply one more character in this dazzling, sometimes perplexing, and wonderfully rewarding practice we call gardening.

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.

Every spring offers another chance to undo the damage done by winter and finally get the garden right.

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.