“In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.”

“Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners.”

“And love, who can say the way it winds.. like a serpent in the garden of our untroubled minds”

“Growth is an unavoidable part of life. Whether we mean for it to happen or not, our bodies continually nourish and regenerate themselves, our minds continually learn and expand, and our lives continually evolve. We have the power to craft our growth the way a landscaper crafts a majestic garden, or we can leave it to chance, allowing it to unfold wild as the weeds that spread across a vacant lot.”

“In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories”

“We're neither pure, nor wise, nor goodWe'll do the best we know.We'll build our house and chop our woodAnd make our garden grow.And make our garden grow!”