Tools and Equipment

Chances are, though, that once we get a garden looking just right and everyone tells us how perfect it is, we'll decide we want to take it apart and try something else or turn our attention to starting a brand new border from scratch. Maybe it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't really need to: It's just what we do.

But a garden is somewhat exalted above ordinary notions of correctness. A garden is more than a matter of the right fish fork, as it were.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

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.

myrmecochory: seed dispersal by ants.

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

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

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

Gardening at first felt like a natural pleasure, and then it became a necessary one.

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.

If the garden was a secret and we could get into it we could watch the things grow bigger every day, and see how many roses are alive. Don't you see? Oh, don't you see how much nicer it would be if it was a secret?

All of longtime gardeners are guilty of experiencing our own irrational, unprovable revelations about what works in the garden.