Finally, I get to have houseplants and they stay alive.
The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted.
I always design a landscape with fixed horizons whether it be mountains or a stone wall around a 20-foot-square plot.
I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers' block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right!
My wife's a gardener. I'd put Astroturf down everywhere, but I get outvoted one to one every year.
A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.
The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.
I grow herbs near the back door, and you can grow a wonderful selection of herbs and window boxes... My idea is that you should grow what you eat. There's no point in growing something like celeriac - which is very difficult to grow - if you hate it.
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
I've just got a flat with a little balcony, so I did that fantastic thing of buying far too many plants and not really knowing what was going to stay alive and what wasn't.
I'm good with furniture, very bad with plants.
I have raised beds, perennial beds, cut flower beds. I have an island on a pond that's just covered in peonies. I have an herb garden, tons of vegetables, raspberries. I have everything. I'm a green guy.
The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.
What's not to aspire to about how to grow your own fruit and vegetables and plants, and then being creative?
I spend a ridiculous amount on pots, lilacs, and alliums.
It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses.
When these suckers had formed roots in the open ground, or kind of nursery where they were planted, they were looked over and the best taken up for potting.
Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well.
The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.
I'd love to have a really flourishing vegetable garden, and I'd love to have a better area for a rose garden or a cutting garden, but I don't. You have to develop a garden in the way that it's meant to be developed.
One of the first gardens I did outside the family was for the designer Hattie Carnegie. I was 23 then, and I went to her salon, but could not afford any of her dresses myself, though I loved them. Miss Carnegie suggested I do a garden in exchange for a coat and dress, and so I designed and planted a garden for her.
There are few plants that are ugly. It's how you use them that may not be pretty.
We have a thousand hydrangea plants bordering the house, and they were all supposed to be pink, but a handful of them keep turning purple.
A good garden may have some weeds.
When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.
