Series

Forsythia is a sheer joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia.

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

Gardeners always delight in doing something that another gardener says can't be done.

The trouble with master plans in gardens, then, is simply that they do not take into account masterful plants. Nor addled masters.

It isn’t that I don’t like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.

Not everyone has the personality to have a public farm.

Gardening is the most profound and complex of the arts, operating not just inessentially or marginally through time, but deliberately and consciously. What makes a garden great is the tension between the dimensions, between what is structurally permanent and what is temporarily, immediately, imposed upon that structure.

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.

. . . the full double [peonies], very like dahlias that have gone to heaven and been transformed.

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.

If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.

myrmecochory: seed dispersal by ants.

There may be a fine line between improving garden flowers and making them ugly.