July 10
"In my next life I want to come back as one of my cats. They basically pretend we don't exist. They sit like two bumps on a log and watch us work for hours in the yard. They're probably wondering, along with the entire neighborhood, why we work so hard in our garden and it still looks like hell."

~ Annie Spiegelman, Annie's Garden Journal Copyright, 1996, Carol Publishing Group

July 11
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.'

~T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

July 12
Incorrigable, brash
They brightened the cinder path of my childhood,
Unsubtle, the opposite of primroses,
But, unlike primroses, capable
Of growing anywhere, railway track, pierhead,
Like our extrovert friends who never
Make us fall in love, yet fill
The primroseless roseless gaps.

~ Louis Macneice, from "Nature Notes"

July 13
To help us create our American Sissinghursts, here's the indefatigable Martha Stewart, who has made a booming career out of telling the rest of us how to live. In book after book and now a magazine, she tells us how to be Marthas; how to remake our lives in her image, creating everything from bread to potpourri to table decorations from scratch. She mines a seemingly inexhaustible vein of nostalgia--perhaps for the childhood we wish we'd had.

~ Abby Adams, from The Gardener's Gripe Book

July 14
Though there are other ways to finance your gardening, one sucessful way is to choose carefully whom you marry. A good and generous man is needed, one who knows how to make money and enjoys sharing it, one who himself is not interested in the actual pursuit of gardening but likes to be proud of the premises.

~ Emily Whaley, octogenarian gardener, from Mrs. Whaley's Charleston Garden

July 15
Gardening is a long road, with many detours and way stations, and here we all are at one point or another. It's not a question of superior or inferior taste, merely a question of which detour we are on at the moment. Getting there (as they say) is not important; the wandering about in the wilderness or in the olive groves or in the bayous is the whole point.

~ Henry Mitchell, "Gardening Is a Long Road" from Henry Mitchell on Gardening. Copyright 1998, Houghton Mifflin Company