Gleanings from the Editor

    Like many gardeners, I began by thinking I was in charge. I would decide what to plant, where to plant it. I would control the color scheme, the height of the border, the flavor of the vegetables, and the juiciness of the fruit.

    Thirty-some years ago when I had my first very-own-yard, I ordered plants I remembered from my youth in north Texas - forsythia, gardenia, snowball bush. In a few weeks, I received a bundle in the mail of what looked like slender dead sticks. My neighbor (another neophyte) and I shared what purported to be pampas grass roots. We weren't sure which was the top and which was the bottom of those dried up masses of hair. (I'm pretty sure we planted them upside-down.)

   In the years that have passed since that time, I learned about building soil and native plants and biodiversity. I also learned that gardening is as much an art as a science. Sometimes gardenias work in spite of the alkaline soil. Sometimes salvias die for no apparent reason. Stuff like that happens in nature.

   That fact is a source of the greatest delight and the deepest frustration. It is also the basic fact of life - in all of life, not just the garden. Sometimes stuff happens that we can't predict, control, or change. Sometimes those things are good: volunteers appear in all their vivid glory, tomatoes are filled with indescribably juicy flavor in spite of the drought, or lilacs bloom in a dooryard where they have no business blooming. Sometimes the things that happen seem to be very bad: hundred-year-old trees fall over in a storm, grasshoppers move into the neighborhood in droves, or the tomato tastes almost exactly like Styrofoam.

   Yet we learn from both the bad and the good. We learn about nature, about gardening, about life. We are the lucky ones.