Nina Pick - The Gardener Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom

The Gardener Says Also available in the
Words of Wisdom series: The Architect Says Laura S. Dushkes The Designer Says Sara Bader The Filmmaker Says Jamie Thompson Stern The Chef Says Nach Waxman and Matt Sartwell The Musician Says Benedetta LoBalbo The Inventor Says Kevin Lippert The Writer Says Kevin Lippert M y favorite garden is my mothers. It grows chaotically, always on the brink of overflowing. The house, located near the center of town, has only a small yard, yet the garden is full of wildness. The bright flowers attract bees and hummingbirds. The soil, nourished with compost, is alive with happy-looking worms.

Following the principles of companion planting, the garden contains roses growing incongruously next to tomatoes, beans next to nasturtiums, squash next to morning glories. It also has occasional visitorsrobins and rabbits, and once even a bobcat, down from the mountain. What I love most about her garden, though, is her affection for it. The garden can be a source of stress, certainlyhow soon to plant in the early spring, when to prune in fall, how to find time for weeding in the middle of a busy weekbut primarily it gives her joy. Abundant, gratuitous, overwhelming joy. Shes beaming when I catch her standing among the pole beans in the summer, and shes beaming just reading the seed catalogues in the middle of winter.

Like the chickadees and the hummingbirds and the worms and the rabbits, when shes in the garden she looks as if shes perfectly situated in the most beautiful place in the universe. The writers and gardeners quoted in this volume delight in all of gardenings many moods and phases. They name both the joys and challenges: the exhaustion at the end of a long days work, the amazement at watching a seedling sprout, the peace and happiness of time spent in reverie on a quiet bench. As they celebrate the gardens mysteries, in prose and poetry, with humor and wonder and humility, their language itself seems to be a kind of blossoming. Thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia / and pawpaw, Ashmeads kernel, cockscomb / and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm; / thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke / good lord please give me a minute, writes poet Ross Gay, his gratitude fecund and spilling over. Their words show gardening and writing as intertwined creative processes.

As Michael Pollan says, Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common. Or, as Elizabeth Lawrence describes, Gardening, reading about gardening, and writing about gardening are all one; no one can garden alone. The authors in this book remind us that a garden is a place of community, a place of worship, a place of work that is aligned not with capitalism but with the greater creative work of nature. As Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, writes, A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. Michelle Obama, who grew the largest vegetable garden ever planted on the White House lawn, similarly emphasizes that children need to garden so that they can learn where their food comes from and see that it doesnt come into being shrink-wrapped at the grocery store but is the result of the human-earth relationship. The act, and the art, of gardening restores us to our senses, both literally and figuratively; it propels us away from our screens and into the world.

One of my favorite quotes in this compilation of favorite quotes is farmer-poet Wendell Berrys I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. Gardening promotes an ecological healing that affects both the earth and the gardener. With our hands in the dirt, we attain a kind of intimacy with place. We are located on and in the earth, participants in its process of creation. We come into right relation with nature, giving it our care and attention; in turn, and seemingly miraculously, the earth blossoms. Gardening is a form of attention, a tending to the wonders all around us.

Writer Philip Simmons, who upon facing death from ALS at the age of thirty-five committed to documenting the miracles of daily life, reminds us, Anyone whos spent time on her knees in a berry patch or flower bed comes to see this attention to small things as a form of prayer, a way of vanishing, for one sweet hour, into whatever crumb of creation we are privileged to take into our hands. As Simmons emphasizes, a garden shows us how to see. And, as The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett says, If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. The lessons learned in a gardencare, hard work, patience, faithteach us how to be good citizens, good friends and neighbors and lovers, good members of our human communities as well as of the more-than-human world. My hope is that this book will invite you to participate in gardening in any form that is right for youfrom enjoying a public garden in quiet contemplation to placing a houseplant on your windowsill, from planting a phrase of daffodils to entire paragraphs of sweet peas. If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.Frances Hodgson Burnett (18491924)EVERYBODY HAS
AN OPINION ABOUT GARDENING.Troy Scott-Smith (1971 )Good gardening is very simple, really. If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.Frances Hodgson Burnett (18491924)EVERYBODY HAS
AN OPINION ABOUT GARDENING.Troy Scott-Smith (1971 )Good gardening is very simple, really.

You just have to learn to think like a plant.Barbara Damrosch (1942 ) Anyone whos spent time on her knees in a berry patch or flower bed comes to see this attention to small things as a form of prayer, a way of vanishing, for one sweet hour, into whatever crumb of creation we are privileged to take into our hands. Philip Simmons (19572002)To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.Mahatma Gandhi (18691948)A garden should feel like a walk in the woods.Dan Kiley (19122004)IN THE SPRING, AT THE END OF THE DAY, YOU SHOULD SMELL LIKE DIRT.Margaret Atwood (1939 ) A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. Gertrude Jekyll (18431932)SOMETIMES A TREE TELLS YOU MORE THAN CAN BE READ IN BOOKS.C. G. Jung (18751961)Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food, and medicine for the soul.Luther Burbank (18491926)Earth laughs in flowers.Ralph Waldo Emerson (180382) The great thing is not to be timid in your gardening, whether its colors, shapes, juxtapositions, or the contents themselves.