I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.
Monty DonRead
I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.
Interpretation
Great gardens should seek to mimic the richness of natural woods, blending cultivation with the wild.
Monty Don's quote reflects the idea that the most beautiful gardens are often those that emulate the natural complexity and diversity found in woodlands. He suggests that a successful garden should not only be a place of cultivation but also incorporate the wild elements that make nature so exquisite, bridging the gap between human design and natural abundance.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about ecological gardening at a gardening club meeting.
I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.
Sweet peas should smell. Half the point of growing sweet peas is to cut them for the house; they should fill a room with an almost painful olfactory inarticulateness. But most sweet peas smell of nothing. This does not stop them being beautiful, but they are like food with no flavour.
Gardening is inevitably a process of constant, remorseless change. It is the constancy of that process that is so comforting, not any fixed moment.
I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man's-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.
I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn't make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.
I have learnt that gardens are like happiness: you cannot pursue them as an absolute thing or moment.
Snow always inspires such awe in me. Just consider one tiny snowflake alone, so delicate, so fragile, so ethereal. And yet, let a billion of them come together through the majestic force of nature, they can screw up a whole city.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long.
Garden making, like gardening itself, concerns the relationship of the human being to his natural surroundings.
There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation alter nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again.
[The natural world cleans water, pollinates plants and provides pharmaceuticals, among many other gifts.] Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.
Unless we stop the degradation of our oceans, marine ecological systems will begin collapsing and when enough of them fail, the oceans will die. And if the oceans die, then civilization collapses and we all die
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