Vegetables

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

Fortunately, by the thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth year or thereabouts, the gardener strikes that balance by which he has the best of all seasons. By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course.

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

. . . some gardens are more fantastic than others, and a very few are so fantastic that they seem to be more about fantasy than about gardening. Like a play within a play, these gardens comment on the nature of illusion, the mechanics of mesmerization, the mystery of why and how the simple act of cordoning off space and time can charge them so highly with meaning.

Gardens are like those extraordinary Faberge eggs made for the czars, revealing surprise after surprise as the season progresses, each week showing some new wonder.

I am all for playing rough with things [i.e., plants] that play rough with us, and for making them behave as our servants, not our masters.

Sometimes survival in compost piles has a way of glorifying a plant you thought you hated.

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

There is nothing better to cure a wicked case of self obsession that a good dose of fresh air and dirty work.

Dreams, not desperation, drive people forward to plant gardens.

In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.

Dreams, not desperation, drive people forward to plant gardens.

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