bloom_records
Low maintenance is for homeowners, not gardeners!
And though one has begun to search for signs of spring almost since January, and to receive them, like postcards sent on a long voyage to home, it is with the greening of the grass that spring has, finally, certainly arrived.
I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid that they are not alive.
I am aware that I have a genetic tendency towards a garden of nothing but Zinnias -- a combination of frugality, laziness, and weakness in the face of all that flash. . . . Knowing what can happen, I restrained myself around the zinnias and didn't pick a single coneflower head.
Even when the future [garden] design is still just a matted clump of dormant perennial roots, it is in our mind's eye the perfect exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Gardening may be the most exasperating occupation under the sun, but it gives as much as it gets--no more no less. Life in a garden is one long war with the powers of Evil, but the victory is worth winning. Maddening catastrophes are followed by spectacular triumphs. One minute you are flat on your face, and the next you are soaring on the wings of the morning.
A writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject--I take that as inevitable.
To many gardeners, seed catalogues are the most accurate depiction we have of the Garden from which humans were expelled.
. . . Whoever it was who said Nature made no mistakes in colour harmony was either colour-blind or a sentimentalist. Nature makes the most hideous mistakes; and it is up to us gardeners to control and correct them.
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.
I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died.
Sleet, incidentally, is the worst five-letter four-letter word I know.
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
