review

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.

The trouble with master plans in gardens, then, is simply that they do not take into account masterful plants. Nor addled masters.

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

A garden is a lovely thing
But gardens are not made
By saying "Oh how beautiful"
And sitting in the shade!

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.

Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment. It bursts upon a man every year . . . as though it had never happened before, but had just been shown by God how to do it, and tried, and found the impossible possible.

Gardening at first felt like a natural pleasure, and then it became a necessary one.

Every spring offers another chance to undo the damage done by winter and finally get the garden right.

Now, nobody imagines his modest little patch is going to be the greatest thing since copper bracelets, no. But it will be personal, and it will be fascinating, because there is no such thing as dullness when the gardener is going full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes, as it were.

I am all for playing rough with things [i.e., plants] that play rough with us, and for making them behave as our servants, not our masters.

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.

There are two difficulties with ground covers: first to get them to grow, and then to get them not to.

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