Tuesday, November 22, 2011

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.

4 comments:

frank@nycg said...

Good Quote. Gotta get that Capek.

And the ground is way workable. Dirt farmers we are.

flwrjane said...

You are more than welcome to come to my disheveled garden and dig away.

Not one bulb have we planted(:

Come. We'll feed you.

xo jane

Terri said...

I miss gardening. I'd love to have elevated beds to plant things in. The bulb spring flowers are my favorites.

Sweetgum Thursday said...

Well kids, it ain't the end of the year yet, but cheers to Frank's field of garlic, to Jane's disheveled bulbless garden and life among flowers and to the possibility that Terri gets to plant something soon.