To garden is to let optimism get the better of judgment.

- Eleanor Perenyi

It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp th…

- Eleanor Perenyi

Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblan…

- Eleanor Perenyi

September is the time to begin again. In the country, when I could smell the wood-smoke in the forest, and the curtains could be drawn when the tea c…

- Eleanor Perenyi

Americans resent the vagaries of weather to a degree unknown to other peoples. ... Weather is a force we have lost touch with. We feel entitled to do…

- Eleanor Perenyi

To see things in black and white is to see the basics, and I would recommend to any designer of gardens that he go out and look at his work by the li…

- Eleanor Perenyi

I have spoken to plants myself, and if pressed for conclusions would have to say that those I threatened did better than those I - well, I wouldn't s…

- Eleanor Perenyi

Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants,…

- Eleanor Perenyi

Or perhaps you notice a congregation of ladybugs on a rose stalk. Don't invoke the old nursery saying and ask them to fly away home. Their house is n…

- Eleanor Perenyi