cold-climate-gardening
Every spring offers another chance to undo the damage done by winter and finally get the garden right.
It therefore became a storage shed, which simply meant a place to put anything you could not find a place for otherwise.
Only I, who live in the tropic of fancy, could be under the apocalypse of snow and ice that is Iowa and not admit that winter really exists.
I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died.
Pruning is an art and a science. The rules are simple, but putting them into practice requires skill and judgment. Looking around, I gather that almost everyone leaves the job to an unskilled yardman with years of inexperience.
This is how it should be with gardens and gardeners. They should love what they own, and own what they love; but their gardens must never own them, for there will be no pleasure in them if they do.
The two most mysterious aspects of clematis are, How is the word pronounced? and, What is its plural form? Once these questions are answered, growing the plants is plain sailing.
In its own way, frost may be one of the most beautiful things to happen in your garden all year . . . Don't miss it. Like all true beauty, it is fleeting. It will grace your garden for but a short while this morning. . . . For this moment, embrace frost as the beautiful gift that it is.
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.
Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature's tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame a garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.
There is very little in gardening that benefits from being done quickly, and weeding teaches the virtues of pace as well as any activity.
I am very fond of the Spring-flowering colchicums, but unfortunately slugs are also, and those greedy gastropods and I have a race for who can see the flower-buds first. If I win I go out after dark with an acetylene lamp and a hatpin and spear the little army of slugs making for a tea party at the sign of the Colchicum.
This is what the true gardener expects. He knows that 'gardening is eleven months of hard work and one month of disappointment.'
