Peonies

Gardening is never risk free. It's not risk free in your first year and it's not risk free in your 40th. . . .There's always another strange spin on the ball. There's always more to learn.

It is one of the peculiarities of garden-making, the greatest of all the arts, that there are no "great" gardens made by welfare recipients …

Dreams, not desperation, drive people forward to plant gardens.

But here experience speaks: never be too far away from man or machine until the sweep of the last [Bobcat] blade, for those who have watched these men at work will know about the amazing interpretations of a plan that can occur.

Not everyone has the personality to have a public farm.

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

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.

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.

Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.

It isn’t that I don’t like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.

In my part of the country, there comes each year one long and occasionally fruitful season when gardening takes places strictly on paper and in the imagination.

I think you need to be possessed to farm, you have to have a calling.

At such times I understand that the enjoyment of looking is nothing compared with the pleasure of gardening--and that I would much rather garden than have a Garden.