What’s up/blooming

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

One way to keep crows out of the corn patch is to plant rhubarb instead.

…the shivery perfection that winter can bring to our gardens.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

There is nothing better to cure a wicked case of self obsession that a good dose of fresh air and dirty work.

There is something about a garden that brings out a fiercely possessive streak in the best of us. All our triumphs, to be really satisfying, must stem from our own individual efforts; and we look with a cold eye upon innovations for which we are not personally responsible. Even a suggestion, however tactfully introduced, is not always taken in good part. . . . We gardeners should not be blamed for this defensive attitude, which is based on the intense interest we take in our work. Without it, gardening would become an undertaking so laborious, so frustrating, so maddening, that there would soon be no gardens at all. As with all truly creative pursuits, the appeal is to the mind and to the heart, rather than to the pocket; and unless we can convince ourselves, beyond any doubt, that the credit is ours, and ours alone, we are like a singer listening to the applause for a song that someone else has sung.

There are two difficulties with ground covers: first to get them to grow, and then to get them not to.

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

It's the gardener's job to choose those that will thrive in his or her climate, rather than trying to force the plants to grow where they're not well suited.

Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment. It bursts upon a man every year . . . as though it had never happened before, but had just been shown by God how to do it, and tried, and found the impossible possible.

For the uninitiated, the reality of what it takes to create and maintain a great-looking garden appears to be an endless string of tiresome tasks and dirty jobs. But true gardeners know that the real fun of gardening in in the process--the planning, the planting, the nurturing, and the learning.

The garden is not only an ornamental place, but a habitat and a civilization.

. . . some gardens are more fantastic than others, and a very few are so fantastic that they seem to be more about fantasy than about gardening. Like a play within a play, these gardens comment on the nature of illusion, the mechanics of mesmerization, the mystery of why and how the simple act of cordoning off space and time can charge them so highly with meaning.