Recipes

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

I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.

In the end, this may be the most important thing about frost: Frost slows us down. In spring, it tempers our eagerness. In fall, it brings closure and rest. In our gotta-go world--where every nanosecond seems to count--slowness can be a great gift. So rather than see Jack Frost as an adversary, you could choose to greet him as a friend.

. . . 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.

. . . the difference between great daffodils and common ones is not so vast as one thinks in the first flush of excitement when one starts being serious about daffodils.

It soon becomes clear to the gardener, who has probably started out to achieve a certain bloom, that the cycle of life in the plant is a good bit more enjoyable than the bloom itself.

Even when the future [garden] design is still just a matted clump of dormant perennial roots, it is in our mind's eye the perfect exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show.

This is what the true gardener expects. He knows that 'gardening is eleven months of hard work and one month of disappointment.'

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.

At such times I understand that the enjoyment of looking is nothing compared with the pleasure of gardening--and that I would much rather garden than have a Garden.

I am very fond of the Spring-flowering colchicums, but unfortunately slugs are also, and those greedy gastropods and I have a race for who can see the flower-buds first. If I win I go out after dark with an acetylene lamp and a hatpin and spear the little army of slugs making for a tea party at the sign of the Colchicum.