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The Quotable Gardener

© Sandra Linville

After having lived in Los Angeles for 15 years, I returned to the Midwest about nine years ago. It was then I realized how attached to the four seasons I am. Yes, the balmy California weather is terrific and the rain, mud slides, the Santa Anas and the earthquakes do provide an exciting change. However, to watch spring erupt from the muted winter and for summer heat to cool into fall with the green leaves turning every shade of orange, red and copper is a glorious thing.

As a novice gardener at the end of winter, I am anticipating the warming of the earth and the first glance of a green tip of a hosta or astilbe as they begin to change the landscape. But, I also remember the beginnings of winter when I was ready for the dormancy. Ready for the rest. Ready to read good books by the fire and look out at the patterns of bare tree limbs against gray skies.

One of those books I’ve been reading is The Quotable Gardener.

More frequently as I contemplate the new planting, wondering if my perennials survived a hard, cold winter, I think of the thriving deer population. It is then I wonder if I will plant anything new this year or spend my time trying to protect my shady garden from marauding deer.

A quote from The Quotable Gardener gives me an idea:

“One day Annie decided to ‘tell the animals they couldn’t eat here.’ Apparently it worked.”
Liza Ketchum Murrow, “Plans of Its Own,” Green Prints, Winter 1992, 1993

I feel less guilty about my resentment of the deer when I read this quote:

“Anyone who gets sentimental over a herd of deer or thinks they’re cute either lives where there aren’t any or else has no interest in gardening.”
Meg Buck, gardener, north-central New Jersey, quoted in “Cottage Garden Art,” by Allen Lacy, Horticulture, January 1988

Kathy Ishizuka has compiled more than 1,000 quotes and advice as well as words of wisdom, experience and good humor. As she writes in her introduction: “The sources collected here are, like my taste in plants, rather eclectic…Beyond the prominent names, I’ve sought to include the thoughts and words of gardening’s rank and file. United here are famed landscape designers, learned plantsmen, and plain ol’ dirt gardeners, all kin of the spade.”

The last word on deer from John McPhee, American writer, (1931-) - "Rats with antlers."

As we continue to be enfolded in the icy blanket of winter I enjoyed the book’s included words of American painter Andrew Wyeth: “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape – the loneliness of it – the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it – the whole story doesn’t show.”

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