Looking forward

The winter holiday celebrations are fading quickly. The green presence and the fragrance of our homes' Christmas trees are about to become a thing of the past. It's the start of a new year - 2013 - and we begin to look forward to spring's verdant growth and renewal.
Even if you have only a window box, it's a great joy to spend time on a cold and gray day browsing through garden seed and plant catalogues. The photographs and illustrations are splendid and bring on dreams of warmer, sunnier times, hands digging into earth, and bountiful harvests of flowers, fruit, and vegetables.
American essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner wrote seriously and sometimes humorously about gardening.

"To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race..."

"The thing generally raised on city land is taxes."

Charles Dudley Warner, American author, 1829-1900
My Summer in a Garden [1870]