Show me a person without prejudice of any kind on any subject and I'll show you someone who may be admirably virtuous but is surely no gardener. Prejudice against people is reprehensible, but a healthy set of prejudices is a gardener's best friend. Gardening is complicated, and prejudice simplifies it enormously.
I know of no common interest that exceeds gardening as a source of lifelong friendships, nor as a means of making new friends almost constantly.
I cannot walk into our garden without constantly being reminded of the friends who have shared their plants.
Gardening transcends everything that otherwise divides us.
Plants are the original chemists. Their sophistication makes DuPont and Monsanto look like little kids with chemistry sets.
Gardener's , like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute. What we see at one particular moment is then and there before us. But there is a second way of seeing. Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by.
Crabgrass is aptly descriptive of this hated weed, for it does scuttle quickly through a lawn.
We can plant to suit the needs of the birds and other wildlife that find a haven and a habitat on our home ground, and we can understand that to do so is a moral dictate, not a personal whim.
I suppose that for most people one of the darker joys of gardening is that once you've got started it's not at all hard to find someone who knows a little bit less than you.
But there is one place where a person can make choices that will lead in a small way toward greater sanity in dealing with the natural order. That place is the private garden.
A powerful hand lens [Eschenback Leutchlupe] with a focused beam of light opens up an entire world below the threshold of the ordinary experience of seeing.
The gardens I love best are those that are still affectionately tended by the people who own them and who made them - who planned and planted and replanned and replanted them, who dug in the dirt and moved hoses and watched the gardens change with the cycle of the seasons and over the passage of years.
Insects leave (Madagascar periwinkle) Catharanthus roseus out of their diets. So, for that matter, do deer. The reason is that the plants are loaded with alkaloids so potent that they are the source of vincristine and vinblastine. These are drugs important in routines of chemotherapy for treating Hodgkin's disease and certain forms of leukemia.
In a well-made garden every day is new.
An angel, legend has it, took pity on a little shepherd girl who had nothing to give to the Infant Jesus in his manger. The angel handed her a weed, but first transformed it into this beautiful flower of winter.
Democracy is fine in politics. It should stay there, and we need more of it. But its political virture is no reason to practice it in the garden.
Not knowing where your food comes from is a primary form of alienation.
Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII of France, had such an aversion to roses that she could not stand seeing one even in a painting.
When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.
Whether the are splashed with gold or white, striped with chartreuse or cream, or margined in light tones, they are nature's weaklings, and nature is still a matter of survival of the fittest. The survival of variegated plants depends on human intervention.
Gardening is in large measure a phenomenon of attention.
Of course, the character of my garden is also determined by things beyond any human decision, mine or anyone else's.
In addition to all its rich offerings to the body and its five senses, gardening engages the mind.
Am I accurately reporting what I see in such a blossom? The answer is no ... and yes.
We quickly discovered that two kittens were much more fun than one.
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