Credo

I am not a serious gardener. I don't know the Latin names of plants, except those that sound subversive or whimsical or mysterious: Phlox subulata, Euphorbia corollata, Nepeta nervosa. I've tried to design my gardens by the book — three of this, seven of that, never four or six — but I always end up doing what looks good to me, because let's face it, I will never show my delphiniums at a fair. No bus tours will ever traipse across my white-clover lawn.

I have land, more than enough land, but very little money and less time. My Beloved laughs when I say I'm a lazy gardener. It's true that I'm out there before the sun gets up and he has to drag me indoors when it's dark, but I don't plant my carrots in rows or deadhead my dahlias and I never turn the soil. I hardly ever water. Only the babies in my beds are coddled.

I follow only one rule. The gorgeous sweep of colour, the upthrust, trailing shapes, the accidental pairings that make me laugh or weep with their unlikely beauty — they exist to please. These gardens don't cost the earth, though they are, in their small way, part of its salvation.

I am resourceful and devoted, self-centered and irreverent, enthusiastic to the point of ecstasy about my plants. I live in a cultivated world alive with sensual delight, a world I shape with my own hands.

I am a frugalista gardener.

— Merilyn Simonds