Unless we are on intimate terms with plants, we can not expect to understand either culture or cultivation.

Every garden is a parable.

The joy and awe of gardening are in its specificity: this seed in this soil at the mercy of this particular weather, the outcome not yet known.

Once those we love have died, we face the daunting task of tucking them into the beds of our minds, where they flower and fade perennially.

To garden is to contemplate mortality and morality.

A garden gives nature a margin in our minds in which it can jot confidential notes to us.

Returning us perpetually to where we began, blending origins and ends, nothing pardons us like a garden.

A flower is only a weed properly situated.

A garden is a map of happiness that includes the truth of decay.

Gardening, like combing our hair, helps us arrange our thoughts.

At whatever scale we choose to garden, we learn to appreciate that we are at nature's mercy, not the other way around.

As time goes on, the gardener is subsumed in the garden so that flowers become memories.