Colchicums
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.
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.
Sometimes survival in compost piles has a way of glorifying a plant you thought you hated.
Gardening at first felt like a natural pleasure, and then it became a necessary one.
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.
. . . We gardeners needn't have a siege mentality toward frost. It's not a villain, holding us hostage in some pitifully short growing season. Jack Frost is simply one more character in this dazzling, sometimes perplexing, and wonderfully rewarding practice we call gardening.
Fortunately, by the thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth year or thereabouts, the gardener strikes that balance by which he has the best of all seasons. By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course.
The garden and gardener have grown alongside each other over the years, each shaping the other.
Nowhere but at home are the flowers the most colorful and the scents the sweetest.
Improbability is not a quality we value in landscapes.
There is of course no such thing as a green thumb. Gardening is a vocation like any other--a calling, if you like, but not a gift from heaven. One acquires the necessary skills and knowledge to do it successfully, or one doesn't.
Time for the weather report. It's cold out folks. Bonecrushing cold. The kind of cold which will wrench the spirit out of a young man, or forge it into steel.
Men with trucks do not see new plantings when reversing or unloading, so trees must wait [to be planted] until all hard landscaping is done.
