Because The Ground is Still Workable

we are still ordering bulbs (with sales galore at the end of the season) and still planting, and right now, if I could have one wish granted, it would be to plant bulbs day in and day out everywhere. I feel a bit like a mad squirrel, but there is something really satisfying about digging those holes and dropping bulbs in, and it's a different satisfaction than the one you get planting tiny seeds. Maybe it's simply because you get to dig deeper into the ground when planting bulbs.

And so here a quote from a book that quotes another book. From Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens, An Essay on the Human Condition where he quotes from Karel Capek's The Gardener's Year, which I am now dying to read.

"While I was only a remote and distracted onlooker of the accomplished work of gardens, I considered gardeners to be beings of a peculiarly poetic and gentle mind, who cultivate perfumes of flowers listening to the birds singing. Now when I look at the affair more closely, I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs himself into the earth..."

I'd like to think that we are cultivating both though, flowers and the soil.