cold_climate
The garden was all in blue and gold, blue was the color of his wife's eyes and gold the color of her hair.
In my part of the country, there comes each year one long and occasionally fruitful season when gardening takes places strictly on paper and in the imagination.
Gardening at first felt like a natural pleasure, and then it became a necessary one.
Optimism overrules pessimism because every spring is an opportunity to start again.
Seeing a plant that you have known only in catalogues is like recognizing a celebrity in a crowd.
The biggest crocuses are also excellent for gardeners who fear they are themselves getting almost too refined to breathe.
Watering, though apparently easy, is difficult to do properly. Ensuring the roots are neither drying nor drowning is an underappreciated art.
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.
To imagine a garden paradise, one must live in one's home and listen to its music. . . . Delicious, blissful pleasure is derived from the garden's use as a continuation of the home.
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 …
One way to keep crows out of the corn patch is to plant rhubarb instead.
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.
What is life, and what is gardening, if one is not always ready to make new friends and make new experiments?
