Francesca Wade

I know gardeners well (or at least I think I do, for I am a gardener, too, but I experience gardening as an act of utter futility). I know their fickleness, I know their weakness for wanting in their own gardens the thing they have never seen before, or never possessed before, or saw in a garden (their friends’), something which they do not have and would like to have

something new, especially something from far away, and from so far away, a place where they will never live

Memory is a gardener’s real palette; memory as it summons up the past, memory as it shapes the present, memory as it dictates the future

ut in the end I came to know how to grow the things I like to grow through looking – at other people’s gardens. I imagine they 27acquired knowledge of such things in much the same way – looking and looking at somebody else’s garden.

I shall never have the garden I have in my mind, but that for me is the joy of it; certain things can never be realised and so all the more reason to attempt them. A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden – Paradise – but after a while the owner and the occupants wanted more.