frost
In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.
Watering, though apparently easy, is difficult to do properly. Ensuring the roots are neither drying nor drowning is an underappreciated art.
Artichokes are no fools.
. . . some gardens are more fantastic than others, and a very few are so fantastic that they seem to be more about fantasy than about gardening. Like a play within a play, these gardens comment on the nature of illusion, the mechanics of mesmerization, the mystery of why and how the simple act of cordoning off space and time can charge them so highly with meaning.
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.
One of the things childhood is is a process of learning about the various paths that lead out of nature and into culture, and the garden contains many of these.
To many gardeners, seed catalogues are the most accurate depiction we have of the Garden from which humans were expelled.
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.
The garden was all in blue and gold, blue was the color of his wife's eyes and gold the color of her hair.
Gardening at first felt like a natural pleasure, and then it became a necessary one.
Gardeners always delight in doing something that another gardener says can't be done.
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.
It isn’t that I don’t like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.
