Collection of quips will soothe gardeners

“Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing `Embraceable You’ in spats.” — actor Woody Allen

THE QUOTABLE GARDENER, edited by Charles Elliott, The Lyons Press, 1999, 271 pages, hardcover, $20.

Searching for a perfect gift for a gardener can be like hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Instead of trying to calculate how many bags of dehydrated cow manure will fit under the Christman tree or attempting to decipher which ergonomically correct digging trowel will turn over the ground and not the user, consider giving a slightly more whimsical present: a book filled with enough chuckles and wisdom to see any gardener through the dark days of winter.

“The Quotable Gardener” will do just that.

This compilation offers observations from presidents and princes to authors and actors. It spans the centuries from the 1300s to the present day, which only makes you realize plants don’t change, and neither do gardeners.

Editor Charles Elliott, an American who lives in London and gardens on the Welsh border near Monmouth, set out to do the impossible in culling the best comments and then organizing them into some semblance of reason. He groups these gems into nearly a dozen chapters ranging from “Wisdom” to “Jaundice.”

He lets American humorist S.J. Perelman fire the first salvo with this line from 1951’s “Acres and Pains”: “To lock horns with Nature, the only equipment you really need is the constitution of Paul Bunyan and the basic training of a commando.”

How many of you are nodding your heads to that one?

This book is a compendium of perspectives that will make you laugh at yourself or the hapless subject as it reminds you that you are never alone when you are laboring over a weed-choked bed — thousands of others have done the same thing; you only wish they were there doing the work for you.

So until Santa stuffs your stocking with this pearl, here are a few of its words of wisdom to tide you over.

The late Henry Mitchell, a Washington Post columnist and author, provides a viewpoint like no other: “By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course.”

Then there’s 19th century American journalist Charles Dudley Warner: “No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have but a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.”

I can’t count how often this has happened to me: “I’ve noticed something about gardening. You set out to do one thing and pretty soon you’re doing something else, which leads to some other thing, and so on. By the end of the day, you look at the shovel stuck in the half-dug rose bed and wonder what on earth you’ve been doing.” — writer Anne Raver, “Deep in the Green,” 1995.

The late British gardener and author Geoff Hamilton brings up a point most gardeners would rather forget: “When Wordsworth’s heart with pleasure filled at a crowd of golden daffodils, it’s a safe bet he didn’t see them two weeks later.”

Sometimes the title of the piece from which the quote is taken is more revealing than the quote:

“One cannot have enough

Of this delicious stuff.”

It’s by E.V. Rieu, titled “Soliloquy of a Tortoise on Revisiting the Lettuce Beds After an Interval of One Hour While Supposed to be Sleeping in a Clump of Blue Hollyhocks” from “A Puffin Quartet of Poets.”

If sometimes you doubt your prowess as a gardener, then let these words from poet and novelist May Sarton (“Plant Dreaming Deep,” 1968) take root:

“I used to be ashamed of how much waste there was even in my unpretentious garden here. I blamed inexperience, impatience and extravagance. But now I have come to accept that one must not count the losses, they would be too alarming. One must count only the joys, and feel continually blessed in them. There is no unlucky gardener, for each small success outweighs each defeat in his or her passionate heart.”

Janine Pineo is a copy editor and gardening columnist at the NEWS.