I love my woodland garden best on rainy days. Each drop is filtered through the Black Walnut above, and I walk along the pathway, admiring each leaf and flower. The play of light as the raindrops settle, illuminating the texture, nature & colour of each. Subtle shifts of light highlight the contrast of leaf, and I imagine the raindrops filtering through the earth towards the roots, and that feeds me as much as them.

• 

• 

• 

“Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right here: in his soil, in his plants, even in himself…
But wildness is more a quality than a place, and though humans can’t manufacture it, they can nourish and husband it…
The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.”

― Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

“A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space — a place not just set apart but reverberant — and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.”

― Michael Pollan (IBID)

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

“Gardening is like landscape painting to me. The garden is the canvas. Plants, containers and other garden features are the colors. I paint on the garden of canvas hoping to create a master piece with my colors.”

― Ama H.Vanniarachchy