Oklahoma_City

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.

'I have had almost every rose that you can grow,' she says, 'and some died, but at least I have made their acquaintance.'

Nowhere but at home are the flowers the most colorful and the scents the sweetest.

What is life, and what is gardening, if one is not always ready to make new friends and make new experiments?

That's why it's good to have family or old friends. They keep you from becoming a prisoner of your own obsessions. The world is wide, there are other pleasures in it besides gardening, and sometimes we gardeners just need to have that pointed out to us.

In the end, this may be the most important thing about frost: Frost slows us down. In spring, it tempers our eagerness. In fall, it brings closure and rest. In our gotta-go world--where every nanosecond seems to count--slowness can be a great gift. So rather than see Jack Frost as an adversary, you could choose to greet him as a friend.