garden_maintenance
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.
If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.
. . . We gardeners needn't have a siege mentality toward frost. It's not a villain, holding us hostage in some pitifully short growing season. Jack Frost is simply one more character in this dazzling, sometimes perplexing, and wonderfully rewarding practice we call gardening.
April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Like longtime parents, longtime gardeners learn when to fret and when to shrug.
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.
A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.
Winter is the icicle in the soul of the gardener.
