"To garden is to elide past, present and future; it is a defiance of time. [...]
The great defiance of time is our capacity to remember - the power of memory. Time streams away behind us, and beyond, but individual memory shapes, for each of us, a known place. We own a particular piece of time; I was there, then, I did this, saw that, felt thus. And gardening, in its small way, performs a memory feat: it corrals time, pinning it to the seasons, to the gardening year, by summoning up the garden in the past, the garden to come. A garden is never just now; it suggests yesterday, and tomorrow; it does not allow time its steady progress."
Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden.
There's another snippet from the book here.
