blog-awards

This is the essence of gardening. Looking forward, planning ahead, feeling as if you are wresting the garden from the grasp of its fatigue. It seems trite to mention it, but fall bed work bestows an enormous amount of pride and sense of accomplishment. It lifts the blues of a brutal year and fills a long winter with the joys of a new spring.

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

A garden is a lovely thing
But gardens are not made
By saying "Oh how beautiful"
And sitting in the shade!

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.

If tending a garden has meant coming under the yoke of the seasons, my capitulation is complete; it is a willed captivity, however, perhaps like any other kind of passion.

Those of us who garden in places where there are only a hundred or so frost-free days perforce do so concisely. We know well that tender plants have a finite life span and that sentences and seasons, no matter how we may choose to lengthen them, must both come to an end. Period.