upstate_ny
Looking back on what I have just written, I see I said sow a vast patch. I am sure this is good and sound advice. Always exaggerate rather than stint. Masses are more effective than mingies.
Even when the future [garden] design is still just a matted clump of dormant perennial roots, it is in our mind's eye the perfect exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show.
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.
But here experience speaks: never be too far away from man or machine until the sweep of the last [Bobcat] blade, for those who have watched these men at work will know about the amazing interpretations of a plan that can occur.
We're all experts in the garden, right up until the moment that we're not. . . .Every single time you try a new crop or new variety or new plot, you risk failure. Even with the tried and true, a year of strange weather can make decades of experience meaningless.
A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.
myrmecochory: seed dispersal by ants.
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.
April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Men with trucks do not see new plantings when reversing or unloading, so trees must wait [to be planted] until all hard landscaping is done.
But a garden is somewhat exalted above ordinary notions of correctness. A garden is more than a matter of the right fish fork, as it were.
Chances are, though, that once we get a garden looking just right and everyone tells us how perfect it is, we'll decide we want to take it apart and try something else or turn our attention to starting a brand new border from scratch. Maybe it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't really need to: It's just what we do.
'I have had almost every rose that you can grow,' she says, 'and some died, but at least I have made their acquaintance.'
