Seeds and Seed Starting

I could not do without a Syringa [mockorange], for the sake of Cowper's Line.

One of the things childhood is is a process of learning about the various paths that lead out of nature and into culture, and the garden contains many of these.

Nowhere but at home are the flowers the most colorful and the scents the sweetest.

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.

Winter is the icicle in the soul of the gardener.

Garden math has always seemed a bit like using MapQuest to find Nirvana.

I am all for playing rough with things [i.e., plants] that play rough with us, and for making them behave as our servants, not our masters.

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.

Getting rid of poor plants is as important as seeking out the best.

Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.

. . . Whoever it was who said Nature made no mistakes in colour harmony was either colour-blind or a sentimentalist. Nature makes the most hideous mistakes; and it is up to us gardeners to control and correct them.

But here experience speaks: never be too far away from man or machine until the sweep of the last [Bobcat] blade, for those who have watched these men at work will know about the amazing interpretations of a plan that can occur.

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.