佚名/Anonymous
I know gardeners well, 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.
I would not be surprised if every gardener I asked had something definite that they liked or envied. Gardeners always have something they like intensely and in particular; at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that, nothing in front of them is repulsive and fills them with hatred, or this thing would not be in front of them. They only love, and they only love in the moment; when the moment has passed, they love the memory of the moment, they love the memory of that particular plant or that particular bloom, but the plant or the bloom itself they have moved on from, they have left it behind for something else, something new, especially something from far away, and from so far away, a place where they will never live (the Himalayas, just for example).
Of all the benefits that come from having endured childhood, certainly among them will be the garden and the desire to be involved with gardening. A gardener's grandmother will have grown such, and such a rose, and the smell of that rose at dusk, when the gardener was a child and walking in the grandmother's footsteps as she went about her business in her garden—the memory of that smell of the rose combined with the memory of that smell of the grandmother's skirt will forever inform and influence the life of the gardener, inside or outside the garden itself. And so in a conversation with such a person (a gardener), a sentence, a thought that goes something like this—"You know when I was such and such an age, I went to the market for a reason that is no longer of any particular interest to me, but it was there I saw for the first time something that I have never and can never forget"—floats out into the clear air, and the person from whom these words or this thought emanates is standing in front of you all bare and trembly, full of feeling, full of memory. 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.