Anna Pavord

Today is the birthday of the garden writer Anna Pavord. 

In her 2010 book, The Curious Gardener, Pavord, culled articles from her newspaper column. Here's an excerpt:

"It was at our first house and on the first patch of ground that we actually owned that I really discovered the point of gardening. It wasn’t a Pauline conversion. There was no sudden, blinding vision of beauty. I didn’t see myself (still don’t) trolling through bowers of roses, straw hat just so, gathering blooms into a basket. Nor had I any idea at first of the immense joy of growing food. But I had at least begun to understand that gardening if it is to be satisfying, requires some sense of permanency. Roots matter. The longer you stay put, the richer the rewards.
"I also realized how completely I had missed the point as a child. Gardening was not necessarily about an end result. The doing was what mattered. At this time too, I learned about gardening as therapy."