Allen Lacy Quotes

A powerful hand lens [Eschenback Leutchlupe] with a focused beam of light opens up an entire world below the threshold of the ordinary experience of seeing.

In a well-made garden every day is new.

Whether the are splashed with gold or white, striped with chartreuse or cream, or margined in light tones, they are nature’s weaklings, and nature is still a matter of survival of the fittest. The survival of variegated plants depends on human intervention.

An angel, legend has it, took pity on a little shepherd girl who had nothing to give to the Infant Jesus in his manger. The angel handed her a weed, but first transformed it into this beautiful flower of winter.

When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language – or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.

Crabgrass is aptly descriptive of this hated weed, for it does scuttle quickly through a lawn.

But there is one place where a person can make choices that will lead in a small way toward greater sanity in dealing with the natural order. That place is the private garden.

One becomes a gardener by becoming a gardener.

Gardening is in large measure a phenomenon of attention.

Gardener’s , like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute. What we see at one particular moment is then and there before us. But there is a second way of seeing. Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by.

Democracy is fine in politics. It should stay there, and we need more of it. But its political virture is no reason to practice it in the garden.

Plants are the original chemists. Their sophistication makes DuPont and Monsanto look like little kids with chemistry sets.