And now, a word from Mark Cullen

A visit to Mark Cullen's blog "From the Garden Shed" this week quotes Sarah. Below you will find an excerpt; to read in it's entireity (and I think you should. This week's entry is called "So you think you can't garden?") click here.

If you breathe, you will get a kick out of gardening.

If you can hear, you will get a lift from the songs of birds in your garden.

If you can feel, you will sleep better having nurtured and grown the clean air machines that we call plants in your own yard.

If you can see you will pause during your 'work' in the garden and become temporarily breathless as you observe a hummingbird sucking
nectar from a flower.

If you still don't get it, go back to the top and re read.

My friend Sarah Rurka at the Home Hardware location in Lloydminster,
Alberta sent me this wonderful quote from the book 'Second Nature'. I think that
you will like it:

Sarah says that 'This book of narratives is a book of tales
of failure, overcome.'And from the book, 'All of the accomplished gardeners I
know are comfortable with failure... and understand that, in the garden at
least, failure speaks louder than success... his failures have more to say to
him. The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is
won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb,
disaster frequently eloquent, at least to the gardener that knows how to
listen.'

The idea that a person cannot or will not pick up a spade or a
trowel and plant something in the soil out of fear of failure is a foreign
concept to the successful gardener. Failure, as Sarah and the author of Second
Nature reminds us, is what we do.