While it is February one can taste the full joys of anticipation. Spring stands at the gate with her finger on the latch.

If you want good roses, sharpen your knife and harden your heart.

Success and failure, triumph and disaster. That is the rhythm of life in the garden.

September is the month of maturity; the heaped basket and the garnered sheaf. It is the month of climax and completion. September! I never tire of turning it over and over in my mind. It has warmth, depth and colour. It glows like old amber.

much of gardening is a struggle against the fecundity of Nature.

Life is like a field, where we must gather what we grow, weed or wheat... this is the law, we reap the crop we sow.

The trees change their voices in autumn as well as their shapes. No longer do they whisper to one another in muffled tones as they did in summer; they talk in a different leaf-language now. The wind moves through the boughs like fingers drawn across the strings of a harp filling the air with the harsh dry sound of sapless leaves. It is the main theme of the autumn music, this murmuring counterpoint of dead leaves.