Nick Senzee

“We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged”
― Heinrich Heine

“Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.... I never see a great garden, (even in my mind's eye, which is the best place to see great gardens around here), but I think of the calamities that have visited it, unsuspected by the delighted gardener who supposes, "It must be nice to garden there."
It is not nice to garden anywhere. Everywhere there are startling winds, once in every five centuries floods....
Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that, even as his pain increases with each loss, he comprehends, truly knows, that where there was a garden once there can be again.”
― Henry Mitchell, The Writer in the Garden

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.”
― Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education