garden-tours

All of longtime gardeners are guilty of experiencing our own irrational, unprovable revelations about what works in the garden.

Gardening may well be one of the world's most important fantasies.

. . . the difference between great daffodils and common ones is not so vast as one thinks in the first flush of excitement when one starts being serious about daffodils.

. . . 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.

Now, nobody imagines his modest little patch is going to be the greatest thing since copper bracelets, no. But it will be personal, and it will be fascinating, because there is no such thing as dullness when the gardener is going full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes, as it were.

Even when the future [garden] design is still just a matted clump of dormant perennial roots, it is in our mind's eye the perfect exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show.