On gardening

Voltaire writes in Candide “All this is well said but we must cultivate our garden“. It is of course not about gardens. Or is it?

Life necessitates maintenance and constant work. What does not receive enough attention tends to deteriorate. Likewise, what we start measuring, maintaining, tweaking little by little, takes a shape that is hard to attain on a first try. Gardens follow the analogy: good looking gardens are often those where the gardener did his or her work by increments, on a regular basis. If we trim everything all of a sudden, the endeavor is not only time consuming. It can also be ugly as everything becomes rough and square, not like nature presents itself.

What Voltaire also meant by his idiom, is that talk is cheap. All this is well said, let’s get to work.