[Petunias are] as hopelessly impractical as a chiffon ball dress.

To garden is to let optimism get the better of judgment.

[Petunias are] as hopelessly impractical as a chiffon ball dress.

I love blue more than any other color. I am inordinately attracted to any blue substance: to minerals like turquoise and lapis lazuli, to sapphires and aquamarines; to cobalt skies and blue-black seas; Moslem tiles - and to a blue flower whether or not it has any other merit.

Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy.

A garden is a private world or it is nothing.

Or perhaps you notice a congregation of ladybugs on a rose stalk. Don't invoke the old nursery saying and ask them to fly away home. Their house is not on fire. Your roses are, with aphids, which the ladybugs are feeding on - and you can bless yourself that they have come to your rescue.