The gardener

A visitor to the garden sees the successes usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future.

The Poetry of Rain

In the poetry of the Hawaiians
rain almost always is the rain of a particular place with a specific character and an allusion to an erotic element of some story draped with names.

The garden waits for the rain, responds to it at once, opens to it, holds it, takes it up and shines with it. The sound and touch and smell of the rain, the manner of its arrival, its temper and passage are like a sensuous visitation to the garden

WS Merwin 3/97 House and Garden (Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry in 1970)

Penelope Hobhouse's 10 Rules of Landscaping:

1. Rely on Geometry
2. Enclose an Oasis, create a paradise.
3. Build rooms with plants - trees, shrubs...
4. Foliage before flowers.
5. Reach for the Sky - trellises, arbors and climbers
6. Plants not politics. No PC.
7. Frame the View - borrow scenery from the neighbors.
8. Repeat Color and Texture.
9. Repeat Simple plant shapes - rows of trees, etc.
10. Unify with ground covers
(Garden Design - she (Penelope Hobhouse) comments that "In America - the natural setting for each garden assumes greater importance than it does in Europe," and "Every Garden should have some element of mystery in its design."

Related:
10 more rules:
My 10+ rules (of landscaping)

10 more rules:

1. Never go out without a notebook
2. Find one mentor - or many.
3. Do your homework.
4. Trust Your Own Experience.
5. Don't get hung up on plants - A Garden is bigger than all that.
6. Never think you'll get it right the first time.
7. Encourage Self-Seeders.
8. Remember, Sunlight and Shade are Design Elements.
9. Avoid Fussiness.
10. Focus on the Garden YOU want.
(Garden Design's Dorothy Kalins' observations of Penelope Hobhouse)
Related:
Penelope Hobhouse's 10 Rules of Landscaping:
My 10+ rules (of landscaping)

My 10+ rules (of landscaping)

1. First, PLANT evergreens to the north (feng shui, good luck)
2. Second, find a place to put in RASPBERRIES and strawberries
3. START with one small area and build an overall plan gradually.
4. Put in plants that make you HAPPY - lilacs, hollyhocks, yellow roses...
5. GENEROUS beds. At least 3' wide w/5' preferred. Too small beds are the worst and most common mistakes.
6. Find out which way the wind blows and put in scented plants so that the scent blows IN to your space.
7. Divide and propagate
8. ALWAYS take a camera and/or a notebook on Garden Tours.
9. BUY throughout the seasons, you'll automatically have year round bloom.
10. SUBSCRIBE to every magazine. Inspiration is where you find it.
11. Stay FLEXIBLE. Ideas about which plants to put where, and how to treat an area, for example, will change due to trial and error and your own changing tastes.
12. KEEP some kind of record of what you planted where and when. A Journal? Why not?
13. Look at it from different perspectives - get up on the roof, for example.
14. Take pride in the results. Enjoy the failures, too. It's a process.
15. Don't be afraid to rip it out and move it somewhere else.

Related:
Penelope Hobhouse's 10 Rules of Landscaping:
10 more rules:

A Garden is

...a place that serves as an art project, an organic produce market, a spiritual practice, a pharmacy.

It offers ongoing lessons in ecology, biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology...

Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time...

Gardening is creativity on a grand Utopian scale. We consult a nonexistent compass and so set off on a journey to Eden, which actually ends when we encounter a sense of place.
(Excerpts from Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place by Jim Nollman 1994)