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.

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.

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.

Am I accurately reporting what I see in such a blossom? The answer is no ... and yes.

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.

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.

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.