I am alleged to have one, at least by those of my friends who garden with less success than I do. That's usually how it goes with a green thumb - nobody quite believes it of them-selves, but when you find someone whose beefsteaks are fat and red by July, and whose delphiniums soar like periwinkle skyscrapers over the prosperous city of their perennial border, the term fairly leaps to the tongue. It figures: Your own failures will seem more bearable if the other gardener has a gift from the gods. [...]

The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe. Success in the garden is the moment in time, that week in June when the perennials unanimously bloom and the border jells, or those clarion days in September when the reds riot in the tomato patch - just before the black frost hits. It's easy to get discouraged, unless, like the green thumb, you are happier to garden in time than in space; unless, that is, your heart is in the verb. For a garden is never done - the weeds you pull today will return tomorrow, a new generation of aphids will step forward to avenge the ones you've slain, and everything you plant - everything - sooner or later will die. Among the many, many things the green thumb knows is the consolation of the compost pile, where nature, ever obliging, redeems this season's deaths ans disasters in the fresh promise of next spring.

Am I this gardener? Not yet, not yet. I still careen from blunders of undercultivation to blunders of overcultivation. What green thumb would ever, out of some misguided liberal notion, offer to share his annual bed with weeds, or let a woodchuck drive him to the point of firebombing his burrow? I remain timid with the pruning shears, too quick to reach for the sprayer, and I find myself yearning for a day when my garden will be finished once and for all.