weeding

A garden raised from seed is a garden raised in the heart, the gardener growing along with the garden.

Time for the weather report. It's cold out folks. Bonecrushing cold. The kind of cold which will wrench the spirit out of a young man, or forge it into steel.

This morning the sun and warmth have gone, a sleety rain is making it difficult to be outside, so I have made a list of the fall jobs. . . . The list that I gradually compile is long, but in order to give myself a sense of accomplishment, I include one or two jobs that I have already done.

Here is a landscape pronouncement of possibly dubious value: Any ilex ought to be planted in front of or below windows for winter beauty, simply because you stare out of windows so much during that season.

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.

It soon becomes clear to the gardener, who has probably started out to achieve a certain bloom, that the cycle of life in the plant is a good bit more enjoyable than the bloom itself.

Despite these losses and setbacks, like King Sisyphus, gardeners forever keep rolling that rock up the hill, convinced we are progressing toward the day it will stay in place up there and not roll back on us, the day our gardens will be just as we want them.

Those of us who garden in places where there are only a hundred or so frost-free days perforce do so concisely. We know well that tender plants have a finite life span and that sentences and seasons, no matter how we may choose to lengthen them, must both come to an end. Period.

Gardening may well be one of the world's most important fantasies.

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.

I think you need to be possessed to farm, you have to have a calling.

Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment. It bursts upon a man every year . . . as though it had never happened before, but had just been shown by God how to do it, and tried, and found the impossible possible.

. . . We gardeners needn't have a siege mentality toward frost. It's not a villain, holding us hostage in some pitifully short growing season. Jack Frost is simply one more character in this dazzling, sometimes perplexing, and wonderfully rewarding practice we call gardening.