crocuses
Improbability is not a quality we value in landscapes.
Gardening is only a refined form of gambling, after all. Sometimes the odds are fearfully against us; sometimes we win; but once the passion seizes us we are the victims of its fascination for life.
Dreams, not desperation, drive people forward to plant gardens.
Like longtime parents, longtime gardeners learn when to fret and when to shrug.
...if it weren't for the New York State agricultural exemption, the family farm couldn't exist.
I think you need to be possessed to farm, you have to have a calling.
Improbability is not a quality we value in landscapes.
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.
You can't grow what you don't have, even if it won't grow when you have it.
For the uninitiated, the reality of what it takes to create and maintain a great-looking garden appears to be an endless string of tiresome tasks and dirty jobs. But true gardeners know that the real fun of gardening in in the process--the planning, the planting, the nurturing, and the learning.
Aren't our gardens assembled fragments of our dreams and daydreams, our memories, images, and visions, remembrances of times past, fantasies, pieces of paradise we try to re-create?
