secret_garden

Optimism overrules pessimism because every spring is an opportunity to start again.

It's Human Nature, or at least a gardener's nature (which is not quite the same thing), to want to live at least one and preferably two climatic zones warmer than where he gardens

Fantasy makes all gardens grow. Without it you may have yard, plot, park, grounds, but you lack the essential ingredient of garden, the element that seizes the imagination and transports or envelops you into a world invented by the gardener.

Winter is the icicle in the soul of the gardener.

And it's a sign of age I think, that I start the day planning to get 5 things done, end it with getting 2 things done, and end up feeling like I've done 12 things.

. . . 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.

It therefore became a storage shed, which simply meant a place to put anything you could not find a place for otherwise.

I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.

One of the things childhood is is a process of learning about the various paths that lead out of nature and into culture, and the garden contains many of these.

When dealing with frost it is always best to be paranoid. In the spring never think it is too late for one more frost to come. And in the fall never think it too early.

It takes exact amounts of rain, light, and heat for buds to open together and result in a few days of rare beauty. It might also, I was startled to realize, take more hours of gardening to create an ideal combination than the number of hours it lasted, but that was of little importance to me. After all, by then I had become a gardener.

For the uninitiated, the reality of what it takes to create and maintain a great-looking garden appears to be an endless string of tiresome tasks and dirty jobs. But true gardeners know that the real fun of gardening in in the process--the planning, the planting, the nurturing, and the learning.

Marcescence is the retention of dead plant organs that normally are shed. It is most obvious in deciduous trees that retain leaves through the winter. Several trees normally have marcescent leaves such as oak (Quercus), beech (Fagus) and hornbeam (Carpinus).