colchicum

Gardening is not some sort of game by which one proves his superiority over others, nor is it a marketplace for the display of elegant things that others cannot afford. It is, on the contrary, a growing work of creation, endless in its changing elements. It is not a monument or an achievement, but a sort of traveling, a kind of pilgrimage you might say, often a bit grubby and sweaty though true pilgrims do not mind that. A garden is not a picture, but a language, which is of course the major art of life.

Watering, though apparently easy, is difficult to do properly. Ensuring the roots are neither drying nor drowning is an underappreciated art.

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

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.

That's why it's good to have family or old friends. They keep you from becoming a prisoner of your own obsessions. The world is wide, there are other pleasures in it besides gardening, and sometimes we gardeners just need to have that pointed out to us.

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.

To many gardeners, seed catalogues are the most accurate depiction we have of the Garden from which humans were expelled.

There are two difficulties with ground covers: first to get them to grow, and then to get them not to.

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

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

But a garden is somewhat exalted above ordinary notions of correctness. A garden is more than a matter of the right fish fork, as it were.

Roses are at their best trailing down in graceful trusses. In fact, they are like supermodels--the goods just look better displayed on tall, thin, limbs.

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.