hydrangea

The garden was all in blue and gold, blue was the color of his wife's eyes and gold the color of her hair.

It should be said, though without any intention of adding to the world’s already adequate store of guilt, that the average gardener is surprisingly lazy and, not to split hairs about it, pig-headed.

Gardening may be the most exasperating occupation under the sun, but it gives as much as it gets--no more no less. Life in a garden is one long war with the powers of Evil, but the victory is worth winning. Maddening catastrophes are followed by spectacular triumphs. One minute you are flat on your face, and the next you are soaring on the wings of the morning.

. . . the full double [peonies], very like dahlias that have gone to heaven and been transformed.

Not everyone has the personality to have a public farm.

This is what the true gardener expects. He knows that 'gardening is eleven months of hard work and one month of disappointment.'

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing better than they have ever done before.

What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all.

This is what the true gardener expects. He knows that 'gardening is eleven months of hard work and one month of disappointment.'

myrmecochory: seed dispersal by ants.

There may be a fine line between improving garden flowers and making them ugly.

But gardening is the art of the frustratingly imaginable, of triumph against ridiculous odds, and even rock-gardeners, devoted to the cult and cultivation of the nearly-invisible, must sometimes dream grandiosely.

And we learned this important lesson: Never, ever plant anything that is supposed to look like something else. It won't.