garden
The gardens [in Japan] are works of art in design, planting and miniaturization. The Japanese favor green gardens, not flowers which die, but evergreens, carpets of moss. Always, the accompaniment of water from a stream directed to fall drop by drop from a bamboo pipe. Each time it stops to allow the water to accumulate, it makes a sound like one dry slap on a drum.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 15.
For gardeners, this is the season of lists and callow hopefulness; hundreds of thousands of bewitched readers are poring over their catalogues, making lists for their seed and plant orders, and dreaming their dreams.
“A Romp in the Catalogues,” March 1, 1958 in Onward and Upward in the Garden (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 3.
Ordering seeds is my reward for finishing the income-tax figures.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 84.
The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.
“A Landscape in Winter, Dying Heroically,” by Sally McGrane, The New York Times, January 31, 2008.
In my garden everything grows on top of everything else, and I let them fight it out.
May 1959 letter to Katharine S. White, in Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), 29.
My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 449.
My garden is all covered up by snow; picked gilliflower Tuesday, now gilliflowers are asleep. The hills take off their purple frocks, and dress in long white nightgowns.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 228.