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The Alexanders of this world who find nations easily conquered should come up against the California annual wild flower seed. It gives you pause: who's the boss? If you need to be boss, stick to nasturtiums and marigolds.

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

Marcescence is the retention of dead plant organs that normally are shed. It is most obvious in deciduous trees that retain leaves through the winter. Several trees normally have marcescent leaves such as oak (Quercus), beech (Fagus) and hornbeam (Carpinus).

I don't mean to complain about my own garden. It serves me and satisfies me quite well, except at the moments when I get into despair over it: very frequent moments, when I long to have some other sort of garden, quite different; a garden in Spain, a garden in Italy, a garden in Provence, a garden in Scotland.

Here is a landscape pronouncement of possibly dubious value: Any ilex ought to be planted in front of or below windows for winter beauty, simply because you stare out of windows so much during that season.

To northern gardeners, this time of year [March] is full of anxious pleasure. Even as they daydream about the botanical pleasures of June and July, ordinary mortals find themselves nearly defeated by the gardening deadlines that pass so swiftly in March. Extraordinary mortals--whose seeds arrived two months ago, whose windows are now full of seedlings, and who are ready to sow peas and carrots the instant the soil thaws--will suffer torments of their own when the perfections they're planning somehow fail to germinate or blossom. A garden is just a way of mapping the strengths and limitations of your personality onto the soil. It would be too much to bear if nature didn't temper a gardener's ambition or laziness with her own unsolicited abundance.

I cannot live without a rose, especially a climbing or rambling rose, for just one truss tumbling in the right spot can be like that last long feather on a hat, a nonchalant sweep that lifts a perfectly acceptable design to another level, a throwaway gesture that means nothing and everything.

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

The pleasure of gardening is often measured by the amount of weeding you don't have to do.

Here is a landscape pronouncement of possibly dubious value: Any ilex ought to be planted in front of or below windows for winter beauty, simply because you stare out of windows so much during that season.