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(Updated regularly. Send suggestions for Writings to klarsen1@unl.edu.) "We all have within us a need to create beauty. And we all can in a garden, however small. It is this need which has written the history of gardens. By looking at our world through its gardens today, we reaffirm the simple human capacity to create beauty on this earth. The vocabulary of gardens is remarkably both an individual and collective one. Art, science, history, culture, and all the wonders of nature combine to create a universal, everchanging language that can enrich each of us through a lifetime.” "The story of Nebraska is not to be discovered at the monstrous historical steel arch spanning I-80 near Kearney or even solely in the yellowing pages stored in files at the State Historical Society in Lincoln . Instead, it is also to be found by meditating under an ancient cottonwood growing along the Mormon and Oregon Trails that once may have given succor and shade to the westward-bound pioineers. It hides among the head—high prairie grasses and wildflowers that bison once tramped through and slept in as they rested from their long migrations to and from the Platte and Republican River valleys. It can be clearly heard in the song of a meadowlark perched on a roadside fencepost, should one only take time to stop and listen. It is present in the gently waving grasses of the green-capped loess hills and the yucca-peppered Sandhills that are easily visible from the noisy interstate, beckoning one like quiet oases in a cacophonous bedlam. It silently calls out in the smell of ponderosa pines among the Wildcat Hills, along the Pine Ridge, and on the crest of Scotts Bluff. The story is there and always has been. How long the story may last and what lessons we may learn from it are up to us.” Paul Johnsgard "Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also. One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself upon it, broadcast himself upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mar those hills, and he suffers. How has the farmer planted himself in his fields; builded himself into his stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills by his struggle! This home feeling, this domestication of nature, is important to the observer. This is the birdlime with which he catches the bird; this is the private door that admits him behind the scenes." John Burroughs "To see things in black and white is to see the basics, and I would recommend to any designer of gardens that he go out and look at his work by the light of the moon." Eleanor Perenyi "It is through close and intimate contact with a particular patch of ground that we learn to respond to the earth, to see that it really matters. We need to recognize the humble places where this alchemy occurs, and treat them as well as we treat our parks and preserves—or better, with less interference. Everybody has a ditch, or ought to. For only the ditches—and the fields, the woods, the ravines—can teach us to care enough for all the land.” Robert Michael Pyle "There is no such thing as an ugly garden—gardens, like babies, are all beautiful to their parents. I rarely see a garden that has nothing to offer—especially when the gardener's enthusiasm is evident.” Ken Druse "The sea, the woods, the mountains, all suffer in comparison with the prairie… The prairie has a stronger hold upon the senses. Its sublimity arises from its unbounded extent, its barren monotony and desolation, its still, unmoved, calm, stern, almost self-confident grandeur, its strange power of deception, its want of echo, and, in fine, its power of throwing a man back upon himself.” Albert Pike “The great ocean itself does not present more infinite variety than does this prairie-ocean of which we speak. In winter, a dazzling surface of the purest snow; in early summer, a vast expanse of grass and pale pink roses; in autumn too often a wild sea of raging fire. No ocean of water in the world can vie with its gorgeous sunsets; no solitude can equal the loneliness of night shadowed prairie.” Sam Butler "I'd always thought of weeding as such drudgery. And it was, in my father's garden. Work, pure and simple. Because it was his garden, his vision. It had nothing to do with mine. But now that I have my own garden, I realize that it exists on two planes. It grows on an earthly plane, of course, subject to the vagaries of sun and rain, the ironclad timing of sunrises and sunsets, the visitations of insects, and my own energy and moods. But it also exists, in a more profound way, in my mind, where it has been growing for many years now…. It's a garden that I carry with me like a happy secret, as I go about the clamorous world outside the garden gate." Ann Raver "The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wildoats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him, as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there. To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch their renewal of life, --this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.” Charles Dudley Warner "The immensity of land and sky in the western Dakotas allows for few trees, and I love the way that treelessness reveals the contours of the land, the way that each tree that remains seems a message-bearer. I love what trees signify in the open country. The Audubon field book describes the burr oak as ‘a pioneer tree, invading the prairie grassland,' and I try to listen to what these ‘volunteers' have to say about persistence, the strength of water, seeds, and roots, the awesome whimsy of birds scattering seed in their excrement, casting not only oak but small groves of Russian olive in their wake. Cottonwoods need more water; their presence signifies ground water, or the meanderings of a creek. Sometimes, in the distance, you glimpse what looks like a stand of scrub brush or chokecherry bushes. But if you turn off the asphalt two-lane highway onto a gravel road, you find that what you've seen is the tops of tall cottonwoods standing in glory along a creek bottom, accompanied by willows." Kathleen Norris "A garden that never died eventually would weary; maybe gardens require walls in time as well as space. The garden winter doesn't visit is a dull place, robbed of springtime, unacquainted with the extraordinary perfume that rises from the soil after it's had its rest. That promise, the return every spring of earth's first freshness, would never be kept if not for the frosts and rot and ripe deaths of fall. I don't think I want to stand in the way of this. (As if I could!) So when I go out from the garden for the last time in autumn, I leave the gate open behind me." Michael Pollan "Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a 6-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." Anonymous "By late September the plants are concentrating all their energies on this process—on writing down their secrets on tiny seed tablets and then encouraging someone, anyone, to take them out into the world. Recipes, instruction manuals, last testaments: by making seeds the plant condenses itself, or at least everything it knows, into a form compact and durable enough to survive winter, a tightly sealed bottle of genetic memory dropped onto the ocean of the future." Michael Pollan "In the old days of the New England transcendentalists, it used to be stated that the cosmos was a reflection of man, that his shadow ran a long way out through nature. Though the idea may be, in some sense, out of fashion, I would venture to remark that men like Emerson and Thoreau, whose interior thoughts contained a place for muskrats, bean fields, and uninhabited peaks, were closer to an analysis of man's original nature, his soul, if you will, than much that has gone on in laboratories since. A wilderness exists in man which refuses to be studied. 'There has been but the sun and the eye since the beginning,' Thoreau once wrote, and some of us prefer to have that eye round, open, and as undomesticated as an owl's in a primeval forest-a forest which invisibly surrounds us still." Loren Eiseley "The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and
deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical
place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations
that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy
rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. "When all is said and done, is there any more wonderful sight, any moment when man's reason is nearer to some sort of contact with the nature of the world than the sowing of seeds, the planting of cuttings, the transplanting of shrubs or the grafting of slips." St. Augustine "Where the produce of two hundred packs of seed, growing madly in the basement, is supposed to be planted in this garden, nobody knows. This is an extreme case, of course, of the affliction common to almost all gardeners, and I mention it to make everybody feel much better…. Still, as her friends tend to comfort one another when her name comes up, she's in better shape than if she took up raising cattle—a thing that mercifully has not yet occurred to her." Henry Mitchell "Most herbaceous plants remain beautiful and interesting throughout
the winter months. Stalks of wheat-colored dried grasses stand like
sentinels, rustling in the breeze, while dried seed heads add sculptural
interest and feed the birds. Even in winter the stark beauty of our
gardens makes them remarkably inviting. SCREECH OWL " Is the nursery open yet? February 4? Better call first. (Maybe better not call. They'll know right away who it is even if I don't tell them, even if I try to disguise my voice: the one they have to scold every spring for insisting on buying a carload of flats of annuals weeks before they sanction their planting. 'I'll keep them in a cold frame for a few weeks,' I have to promise before they'll let me take them home, as they look at me suspiciously while running my American Express card through the machine. Like they don't believe I really have a cold frame. Which I don't. I start planting the minute I get them home. Some spring soon, I'm afraid they're going to ask for proof, and like a teenager with a fake ID, I'm going to have to procure on the streets a fake cold-frame certification.)" Arthur T. Vanderbilt II "But we do yearn for color in winter and the hunger for it is large, and stubbornly we continue our search…. Next year, when I see to this hill that rises just out in the far foreground of my south window, I will know what to plant. Things that produce fine sturdy stalks. Things that have large hard seed vessels and many developments of the stem. Things that sway as well-for this is the other difficulty of winter: suppleness is gone. I will have many grasses on the hill." Robert Dash November 26 "The wisdom of the few, struggling trees on the plains, and the vast spaces around them, are a continual reminder that my life is cluttered by comparison. At home, an abundance of books and papers overlays the heavy furniture I inherited from my grandparents. A perfectly simple room, with one perfect object to meditate on, remains a dream until I step outside, onto the plains. A tree. A butte. The sunrise…. The trees that fan me are the fruit of others' labor, planted by an earlier generation of plains dwellers who longed for trees to shelter them. The land resisted, but let them have these few. I am startled by something flashing through the trees—it is the Pleiades, all seven of them plainly visible with the naked eye. This is another's work, and a mystery. And it is enough." Kathleen Norris :"Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them in mind; but few care to look at the winds, though far more beautiful and sublime, and though they become at times about as visible as flowing water." John Muir [In autumn] "we're satisfied with anything that's growing, whether or not it's the best. Our gardening goal of an orchestrated display of continuous bloom from the opening notes of early spring to the cymbal crash of first frost, so that the gardens appear to flower all season with seamless set changes between scenes, is a misty memory. Now we understand just what Thoreau wrote in his journal about how 'the youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.' At the end of the summer, battle-weary and bowed even if not broken, we've learned the woodshed of our garden will have to do." Arthur T. Vanderbilt II "The prairie itself, though it once covered vast areas, is in many respects a small-featured, fine-textured community, so that it is possible to reproduce many—though certainly not all—of the attributes of a prairie in an area as small as an acre or even less." William R. Jordan III "You can't dig up wild roses and take them away from their work. They sag in gardens, starved for a gravel road, the hot summer wind, and cracked clay of a ditch. They don't want to be pretty or fragrant or to get too close to one another. Wearing their stained white aprons and moth-eaten pink dresses, each has a few red rose hips to bake and get frosted by state fair time. That's all they care about. If it was good enough for their mothers, it's plenty good enough for them." Ted Kooser BACK YARD (from In Our Very Bones, Twyla Hansen) trumpetcreeper
and sumac and and I sit
at dusk my back yard
unable at home but
not contained, already "June 19.-Pure sunshine all day. How beautiful a rock is made by leaf shadows! Those of the Live-oak are particularly clear and distinct, and beyond all art in grace and delicacy, now still as if painted on stone, now gliding softly as if afraid of noise, now dancing, waltzing in swift, merry swirls, or jumping on and off sunny rocks in quick dashes like wave embroidery on seashore cliffs. How true and substantial is this shadow beauty, and with what sublime extravagance is beauty thus multiplied!" John Muir "When I climb I almost always carry seeds with me in my pocket. Often
I like to carry sunflower seeds, or an acorn, or any queer 'sticktight'
that has a way of gripping fur or boot tops as if it had a deliberate
eye on the Himalayas and meant to use the intelligence of others to
arrive at them…. You can call it a hobby if you like. In a small
way I am a world changer and leaving my mark on the future. Most of
it will come to nothing, but some of it may not. Anyhow, I like to see
life spreading and not receding. Blake once said that you could not
pluck a flower without troubling a star…. It is, of course, an
irresponsible attitude, since I cannot tell what will come of it." Planting Trees "As one studies prairies, one after another and year after year over a wide area, he is impressed with the changes in grassland communities, as water content is affected by topography, which repeat themselves so vividly and faithfully. In fact he becomes able to visualize that the entire landscape is a great grassland, a picture mostly blotted out by man but one that can be reconstructed with such a high degree of clearness and certainty that it seems only yesterday that the grandeur of the prairie existed in its entirety." J.E. Weaver, North American Prairie "When we begin to observe nature, we usually first
learn the names of the flowers and delight in each one for its special
loveliness. Or we identify the trees by their distinctive characters.
Such an interest enlivens every excursion out of doors, whether we travel
along the road through the countryside by automobile or follow the courses
of streams while trout-fishing, whether we skim lake and river in canoe
or climb over the mountain trail. It is then that we begin to associate
the individual plants with the locations where we find them…. Gray
birches group themselves together on the side of the hill. The northern
mountains are made magnificent by the pines that are characteristic
there. What are these pictures that we have suggested but the beginning
of a realization that plants are an integral part of their own landscape?
As soon as we catch this close relationship of plants to the places
where they grow we are potential ecologists, whether the name is familiar
to us or whether we have to look it up in the dictionary to discover
that ecology is the study of plants in relation to their environment." "The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer… But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and 'tis mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey." Ralph Waldo Emerson "Wild plums grow everywhere along the roadsides in our
part of the country, each thicket originally started by some bird pausing
on a fence wire just long enough to deposit a plum pit coated with a
dollop of rich lime. The lines of plum bushes grow eight to ten feet
high, interweaving their thorny branches, and in winter they resemble
a great blue-black caterpillar crawling along the road. And in fact
they are crawling, spreading by persistent little suckers that creep
in every direction. Road work on one side and field work on the other
keep the plum bushes confined to the ditches, but in spring, at the
edge of every plowed field, you can see their broken, searching shoots,
split open and stripped of their bark by the plowshare…. "The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command." J.R.R. Tolkien "When I was new to the ways of plants and flowers my one aim was to fill the garden with things that bloomed from spring to frost. My next step was the discovery that the perfect garden consisted of a series of exquisite, ever-changing scenes following one another. But still I thought in terms of bloom…. Then something subtle and still more lovely crept into my appreciation of gardens. I think it began one autumn when I was wandering through a cornfield in the west, where piles of ears among the raggedy shocks vied in brilliant color with the Pumpkins that grew on the coarse nubbly ground. Along the edge of this field was a profusion of Milkweed. The graceful pointed pods burst here and there as we passed, and gentle breezes sent downy white parachutes in all directions, each with its cargo of one small brown seed. The sun glistened on these glossy wisps whirling like blowing snow. The sky was blue, the pods were gray, the Corn and Pumpkins a golden orange-and the total unforgettable. Of that moment was born a new idea. No one could deny the charm of flowers themselves; but in always seeking blooms we had missed the beauty of this other stage of growing things. A bud may be gentle and full of promise, a flower may be vital and spectacular; but all the tenderness and drama of both are combined and intensified in the beauty of the seed pod which is their culmination. It is a beauty of form, of shape and of texture, if not of vivid color." Jean Hersey "Today, though the notion of wilderness lingers as
an ideal, in fact our hand is evident everywhere and 'all the world's
a garden.' If that garden is to be eminently fit for human habitation
while respecting the resources and requirements of other living communities,
its making will depend partly on an understanding of ecological principles
and partly on the creative skills and techniques that are in the gardener's
domain." Rick Darke
"If in the human economy, a squash in the field is worth more than a bushel of soil, that does not mean that food is more valuable than soil; it means simply that we do not know how to value the soil. In its complexity and its potential longevity, the soil exceeds our comprehension; we do not know how to place a just market value on it, and we will never learn how. Its value is inestimable; we must value it, beyond whatever price we put on it, by respecting it." Wendell Berry "The scientist in me believes that enough prairie must be rescued and restored to make research practical. The romantic in me believes it can give us a glimpse of the immense original wealth which we have capitalized—of how things were as we first saw them long ago, when we were land-hungry and a-westering. Part of the prairie mystique is the pure Americana embodied in things that most people have never seen before, and will see nowhere else. Flowers with the old homespun names of rattlesnake master, blazing star, blacksamson, prairie smoke, compass plant, butterfly milkweed, wild indigo, windflower, kittentails, spiderwort, Culver's root, queen-of-the-prairie, blue-eyed-grass, shooting star, catchfly, and many others, all woven into the fabric of tall grasses in a pioneer quilt of form and color." John Madson "It might be a good thing for gardeners to go a little easier on the local wilderness, when they are lucky enough to have some of it left. And maybe in doing so we would find a way to make our gardens a little less derivative—more American, and perhaps more contemporary, too. Not by giving them over to the forest or formlessness—that doesn't accomplish anything—but simply by taking some care to honor the landscape's past, and whatever remains wild in it." Michael Pollan "It is often remarked, 'native plants are coarse.' How humiliating to hear an American speak so of plants with which the Great master has decorated his land! To me no plant is more refined than that which belongs. There is no comparison between native plants and those imported from foreign shores, which are, and shall always remain so, novelties. If, however, as is said, our native landscape is coarse, than as time goes by we, the American people, shall also become coarse because we shall be molded into our environment… The suggestions nature offers are tremendous, and it is a great mistake to think that one mind can comprehend them all. One can love only a few things in life, and it is the things we love which take our whole interest and out of which we can bring forth the best we have." Jens Jensen "Gardening is more than just choosing good plants. The best gardens, I'm convinced, not only add beauty to their immediate surroundings, they belong. They belong to their maker, the yard they have transformed, the home they enhance; they belong to the local landscape as well. Let the colors, forms and textures of the natural environment nearby make their impression. The natural landscape, with its predominant colors, shapes and vistas, should inspire an echo of some sort in the garden microcosm." Lauren Springer "If you wish to make anything grow you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. 'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpractised. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and to love growing things." Russell Page "I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany." Annie Dillard "One of the things I learned to do as a young gardener was look at plants bit by bit, to see if there was anything that delighted me. Never mind what the plant is famous or infamous for. Look, and see for yourself. If a book did not tell me the smooth bark of crape myrtles is one of the great sights of this world, I found it out anyway, just by looking. I learned it made no great difference if lumbermen said the silver maple or the white willow or the paper mulberry were weed trees, because I began to notice they had exceptional beauty of bark or outline. I learned that sometimes thorns may be the most ornamental aspect of a rose (as in Rosa pteracantha) and that the fruit of the tea crab (though rarely mentioned since the praise usually concentrates on the flowers and their scent) is one of its major glories…. It is the spectrum, not the color, that makes color worth having, and it is the cycle, not the instant, that makes the day worth living." Henry Mitchell "Since my father always chose to drive the team on our
numerous trips to town, I was left free to observe to the fullest, details
of scenery, vegetation, and other new facets of the country. In this
way I saw for the first time such marvels of beauty as the great white
evening primrose known as Gumbo Lily and the Sego Lily, or Mariposa.
Off the wagon I would hop, to kneel and study the blossom closely, then
run to catch up. Other finds that first spring were the prairie bluebell,
a thrilling charmer, and some dwarf Penstemons in rosy lavender and
glowing sky blue, new to me even as to family. As the days and years
went by there were many, many more such experiences. Certain parts of
the western prairies are treasure troves of floral delight. "Yet I suspect that once I began to garden, this book was probably inevitable. As most gardeners will testify, the desire to make a garden is often followed by a desire to write down your experiences there—in a notebook, or a letter to a friend who gardens, or if, like me, you make your living by words, in a book. Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common. In my part of the country, there comes each year one long and occasionally fruitful season when gardening takes place strictly on paper and in the imagination." Michael Pollan
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. 
A gardener's best tool is the knowledge from previous seasons. And it can be recorded in a $2 notebook.” Andy Tomolonis