Narcissus

In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.

Intensive gardening, biodynamic bed-building, and every other gardening technique will seriously insult your imagination if you follow every step blindly. Every gardener should experiment and adapt.

There is something about a garden that brings out a fiercely possessive streak in the best of us. All our triumphs, to be really satisfying, must stem from our own individual efforts; and we look with a cold eye upon innovations for which we are not personally responsible. Even a suggestion, however tactfully introduced, is not always taken in good part. . . . We gardeners should not be blamed for this defensive attitude, which is based on the intense interest we take in our work. Without it, gardening would become an undertaking so laborious, so frustrating, so maddening, that there would soon be no gardens at all. As with all truly creative pursuits, the appeal is to the mind and to the heart, rather than to the pocket; and unless we can convince ourselves, beyond any doubt, that the credit is ours, and ours alone, we are like a singer listening to the applause for a song that someone else has sung.

Pruning is an art and a science. The rules are simple, but putting them into practice requires skill and judgment. Looking around, I gather that almost everyone leaves the job to an unskilled yardman with years of inexperience.

You always carry the memory of your garden in your heart. No matter where on earth you are . . . some mysterious tie will always bind you to your very own patch of soil.

It is not a bad thing for plants to express individualism. Not everyone can be a marigold.

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.

Those of us who garden in places where there are only a hundred or so frost-free days perforce do so concisely. We know well that tender plants have a finite life span and that sentences and seasons, no matter how we may choose to lengthen them, must both come to an end. Period.

. . . 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.

Gardening is the most profound and complex of the arts, operating not just inessentially or marginally through time, but deliberately and consciously. What makes a garden great is the tension between the dimensions, between what is structurally permanent and what is temporarily, immediately, imposed upon that structure.

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

. . . 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.

Only I, who live in the tropic of fancy, could be under the apocalypse of snow and ice that is Iowa and not admit that winter really exists.