Suite101 e-Book
Thoughts from the Garden

When we start that first garden, we have great hopes that we are creating something that will give us self-satisfaction and well as a lot of visual pleasure. We tuck in those baby seeds, or perhaps tiny plants, and then we sit back and start to hope.

And hope is really what gardening is all about. To garden is to believe in tomorrow is how the optimist may phrase it. The pessimist is more likely to tell visitors "you should have been here last week" or "you should have waited until next week" because no one day ever seems to quite create the vision of "garden" that resides in out minds eyes.

Hope, optimism ? perhaps a lift from a fleeting fit of despondency. Gardens give us all of these things and more. Gardens can be therapeutic. People heal better in a garden ? medical research proves it.

Gardening promotes friendship and sharing. You give a cutting of a treasured plant to a friend, and then yours dies. The friend is then able to share it back so nothing is lost, but more friendship is gained.

There is a lot more to gardening than simply poking things into the dirt and watching them grow. And that is what this book is about ? the human side of gardening. It is more about the gardener than the garden, because I don't want you to miss out on the true joy of gardening because you lose it somewhere in the weeds.

As much as painting, writing, or any other art form your garden is an expression of who you are. You may like that expression and what it says = as long as you take time to stop and enjoy the flowers instead of constantly working in them.

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