No safe and easy way

There is no safe and easy way to gardening. You can’t learn how to garden by sitting in a comfortable chair and reading gardening books. You must plunge in; you must be willing to stand the back-ache and the soiled hands. You must be willing to be seen, at all hours, in disreputable clothes. You must have the patience of Job and the resignation of a saint. And after you have acquired these virtues you can count yourself a gardener. So many good people think that gardening is an arty sport, a thing to be played with when you will. How wrong they are! For if you would be sister to the sun and brother to the wind, you must work and work hard.

~Stella Owen in Urban Rock Gardener, January 2022 issue p. 4 (newsletter of the Manhattan chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society)