garden-blog

They should look pretty together, if only my scheme comes off. Alas, how seldom do these little schemes come off. Something will go wrong; some puppy will bury a bone; some mouse will eat the bulbs; some mole will heave the daphnes and the lilac out of the ground. Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

Dreams, not desperation, drive people forward to plant gardens.

. . . Whoever it was who said Nature made no mistakes in colour harmony was either colour-blind or a sentimentalist. Nature makes the most hideous mistakes; and it is up to us gardeners to control and correct them.

But gardeners do not dwell too long on catastrophe. Failure is an accepted part of daily life and we value our successes the more.

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?

I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.

…the shivery perfection that winter can bring to our gardens.

This is the essence of gardening. Looking forward, planning ahead, feeling as if you are wresting the garden from the grasp of its fatigue. It seems trite to mention it, but fall bed work bestows an enormous amount of pride and sense of accomplishment. It lifts the blues of a brutal year and fills a long winter with the joys of a new spring.

It is a great joy the day we discover that we can learn things without having to make the mistake ourselves.