spring_fling

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.

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

Like longtime parents, longtime gardeners learn when to fret and when to shrug.

What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all.

. . . the full double [peonies], very like dahlias that have gone to heaven and been transformed.

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.

The garden is not only an ornamental place, but a habitat and a civilization.