Does a Collection of Plants a Garden Make?

Sometimes I think that I have no more room in my garden for any more plants.

Then a friend gives me a plant and everything changes.

I have found myself often at that spot.

I think that a garden can be both a collection of plants and a work of art at the same time.

In Elizabeth Barlow Rogers’  book Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries I came across the English garden writer E. A. Bowles (1865-1954).

Bowles wrote, “It is in the making and remaking that a garden remains alive; without the gardener’s passion to incorporate new plant varieties and to redesign the garden in pursuit of a never quite-acheived dream of perfection, it will become merely an exercise in routine maintenance or else suffer the all-too-common fate of neglect and oblivion.”

It is alright to collect plants and simply enjoy them as your garden.

I remember a Rhode Island garden on tour a couple of years ago during the American Hosta Society’s annual meeting.  The garden featured over 1000 hostas. That award-winning garden certainly was a collection of plants but beautifully displayed. (below].

That proved to me that a garden can certainly be a collection of plants, as Mr. Bowles suggested.

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