gardening

Despite these losses and setbacks, like King Sisyphus, gardeners forever keep rolling that rock up the hill, convinced we are progressing toward the day it will stay in place up there and not roll back on us, the day our gardens will be just as we want them.

He who leaves no stone unturned will have a sore back.

To many gardeners, seed catalogues are the most accurate depiction we have of the Garden from which humans were expelled.

But along the way we really do learn that marigolds gain enormously in impact when used as sparingly as ultimatums.

I'm always pleased when the garden is neat and tidy. That's when it looks like a garden. Nature is plants and the complicated ecosystems that support them. But even the most natural of gardens is an unnatural arrangement of plants. We stamp our will upon the landscape, even those of us who prefer to work with nature. And often, like this weekend, nature stamps back. Maybe it's that dramatic tension between artfulness and chaos that keeps us coming back to the garden. Or maybe it's just the flowers and blue skies and finding two little snakes under a rock.

Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common.

We have to stand still in a garden and listen to its rhythms, look for the signs and symbols and meanings, hear its utterances. We have to look down and up, notice the needles and the haystacks.