Where Laboratory meets Library

Jennifer Bennett in Our gardens, ourselves : reflections on an ancient art quotes Elizabeth Lawrence to the effect that

I cannot help it if I have to use my own well-designed garden as a laboratory, thereby ruining it as a garden.

The quotation is plucked somewhere from Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins. It reverberates for me with a notion that I have held for a long time that a garden is a library (a kind of DNA bank). Whether the library comes equipped with scanners or limits users to note taking in pencil, the old work of quotation and annotation has a familiar gardening feel.


And so for day 395
12.01.2008