Real gardening is dying, dying . . . dying. There aren't many gardeners of my calibre left. I am a young man who has got caught in the old ways. I am thirty-nine and I am a Victorian gardener, and this is why the world is strange to me.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, January 26, 2023
The World Is Strange to Me
Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (New York: Pantheon, 1969), p. 108 (Christopher Falconer speaking):