Patrick
https://www.goodreads.com/pgm60640
It was the height of foolishness, academia. You sank down and down in debt, in desperation, in hunger, so that you could feel a little special, a little brilliant in your small, dark corner of the universe, knowing something that no one
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“They make extravagant use of gardens, do artists, they individualize them—a Monet garden is a world away from a Van Gogh garden—the garden may shape their work, but their gardens also shape our perception of the garden, of plants and flowers, so that, once seen, a particular painting will forever influence our own vision: reality is affected by metaphor.”
― Life in the Garden
― Life in the Garden
“Social mobility I suppose but now the upper classes drink cheap bourbon with tap water and a sprig of ragweed.”
― Wolf
― Wolf
“I suppose the fascination of gardening lies a lot in the way one can plan for the future. Especially in such an insecure world. I open my morning paper and read of some fresh new horror the scientists have devised and then I plan some change in the garden that won’t be fully realized for at least five or six years. It’s illogical, of course, but it’s some comfort.”
― The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot
― The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot
“Lavender stoechas, which is all over these Spanish hills, should not damp off as it is apt to do in an ordinary border. This lavender would form agreeable clumps between the bulbs; fairly dwarf, it makes a change from the usual lavenders, such as the deep purple nana atropurpurea. Clip them close, when the flower-spike is going over, to keep them neat and rounded.”
― Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West and the Creation of a Garden
― Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West and the Creation of a Garden
“It does seem odd now, this early-twentieth-century view that social status made one kind of physical activity—work, you could call it—acceptable and another very much not. Gardening, you get a lot hotter and dirtier than you do dusting a room or washing a floor. But gardening was a genteel occupation, housework a demeaning task that you paid someone else to do.”
― Life in the Garden
― Life in the Garden
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