rosemary

Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature's tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame a garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.

And though one has begun to search for signs of spring almost since January, and to receive them, like postcards sent on a long voyage to home, it is with the greening of the grass that spring has, finally, certainly arrived.

A garden raised from seed is a garden raised in the heart, the gardener growing along with the garden.

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.

Gardening is not some sort of game by which one proves his superiority over others, nor is it a marketplace for the display of elegant things that others cannot afford. It is, on the contrary, a growing work of creation, endless in its changing elements. It is not a monument or an achievement, but a sort of traveling, a kind of pilgrimage you might say, often a bit grubby and sweaty though true pilgrims do not mind that. A garden is not a picture, but a language, which is of course the major art of life.

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

Watering, though apparently easy, is difficult to do properly. Ensuring the roots are neither drying nor drowning is an underappreciated art.

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

. . . 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.

…the shivery perfection that winter can bring to our gardens.

Working the soil brings me back to my own nature, as I now understand that tending a garden is the same as taking care of myself.

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 no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.