“People like gardening because it differs from the “efficiency” of modern life.  People like to dig, and they like to dig with the same spade or fork that their predecessors used a thousand years before them.

They like to tie up grapevines.  They like to prune great climbing roses.  They like to stake lilies.  I once had 2,500 bloom stalks of irises in May and 250 stakes that I moved about as needed.  I quite enjoyed staking the irises, because the idea was not to save time but to gaze at each stalk one by one, and of the perhaps 20,000 iris flowers that year, not one opened and not one faded but I noticed it and, while it was in bloom, gazed at it.”

— Henry Mitchell, from Henry Mitchell On Gardening