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