snowdrop

There’s one good thing about snow, it makes your lawn look as nice as your neighbor’s.

Agri-tourism is the last refuge of agriculture

And we learned this important lesson: Never, ever plant anything that is supposed to look like something else. It won't.

This is the essence of gardening. Looking forward, planning ahead, feeling as if you are wresting the garden from the grasp of its fatigue. It seems trite to mention it, but fall bed work bestows an enormous amount of pride and sense of accomplishment. It lifts the blues of a brutal year and fills a long winter with the joys of a new spring.

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

Gardening is only a refined form of gambling, after all. Sometimes the odds are fearfully against us; sometimes we win; but once the passion seizes us we are the victims of its fascination for life.

A garden is half-made when it is well planned. The best gardener is the one who does the most gardening by the winter fire.

You can't grow what you don't have, even if it won't grow when you have it.

Good gardening is very simple, really. You just have to learn to think like a plant.

There is nothing like pruning a grapevine for training oneself to think like a plant.

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

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing better than they have ever done before.

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.

I cannot live without a rose, especially a climbing or rambling rose, for just one truss tumbling in the right spot can be like that last long feather on a hat, a nonchalant sweep that lifts a perfectly acceptable design to another level, a throwaway gesture that means nothing and everything.