ccg_history

You can't grow what you don't have, even if it won't grow when you have it.

It takes exact amounts of rain, light, and heat for buds to open together and result in a few days of rare beauty. It might also, I was startled to realize, take more hours of gardening to create an ideal combination than the number of hours it lasted, but that was of little importance to me. After all, by then I had become a gardener.

Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

Gardening may well be one of the world's most important fantasies.

It is a great joy the day we discover that we can learn things without having to make the mistake ourselves.

. . . A bunch of daisies has a peculiarly earthy smell, especially when it comes as a hot little gift in the hand of a child.

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.

It is one of the peculiarities of garden-making, the greatest of all the arts, that there are no "great" gardens made by welfare recipients …

Fantasy makes all gardens grow. Without it you may have yard, plot, park, grounds, but you lack the essential ingredient of garden, the element that seizes the imagination and transports or envelops you into a world invented by the gardener.

Chances are, though, that once we get a garden looking just right and everyone tells us how perfect it is, we'll decide we want to take it apart and try something else or turn our attention to starting a brand new border from scratch. Maybe it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't really need to: It's just what we do.

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