Henry Mitchell on Gardening.

Reading about gardening is more fun than actually gardening, at least some of the time. The tired feet are on the ottoman; the back, throbbing from a day of digging and hauling, is ensconced on the couch; and the aching hands, scratched and red, are doing nothing more than turning pages and lifting a cup of coffee. The garden you imagine on the couch is glorious and fully grown. The gardener sees the project in all its finished perfection, conveniently omitting visions of the labor, the failures, and natural disasters that must go into making a garden.

The late Henry Mitchell, a Washington Post reporter, wrote his weekly "Earthman" column for the Post for twenty years; Henry Mitchell on Gardening is the final of three collections of these columns (the others are The Essential Earthman [1993] and One Man's Garden [1992]). Of all the garden writers I've read, Mitchell is the most comforting. Here is respite from the taskmasters who tell you what must be done this week, or else; from the plant snobs; and most of all, from the idea that perfection is an attainable goal. In "Not Everyone Wants to Go Whole Hog into Gardening," he suggests a landscape design featuring shrubs such as viburnums, flowering quinces, and skimmias, plus a few evergreens, bounded by simple plantings of daffodils, a hundred if you can afford them.

"Such a scheme would not satisfy a deep-dyed gardener," he writes, "but would bring much pleasure with virtually no labor to the new homeowner who is perhaps much preoccupied with small tots and a terrier and a job."

Mitchell is comforting because he believes that the gardener's life is full of woe; that storms and droughts blow and decimate, but "things even out"; that gardening is no job for rigid people; and that you ought to make do with what you have. Now those are refreshing thoughts. A garden is always full of catastrophes: expensive hostas devoured by slugs; an entire row of andromedas that withers and dies; the sourwood tree run over by a cement truck; the infant Peegee hydrangea flattened by the children's gigantic ball. These calamities may not happen in Martha Stewart's garden, but they do in mine. Life goes on.

You can judge a person by his response to failure, Mitchell writes. He praises Thomas Jefferson not for his successes, but for his plans, his passions, his equanimity. "One of Jefferson's most endearing qualities was his serenity in the face of garden disasters, which were as frequent at Monticello as anywhere else," Mitchell writes. Jefferson was always working on his garden in his imagination. And gardening on the couch, to Mitchell, is the mark of the true gardener. "If you fail in small things and cannot perfectly manage your small garden, then expand and take on three times as much. That is gardening orthodoxy and Jefferson believed it with all his heart." If chinaberry trees couldn't survive at Monticello, Jefferson planted them anyway. He had copper beeches shipped in from Washington, Mitchell rejoices, "and if they perished then he tried again and if necessary yet again. He was going to have them and he did. Normal folk would give up at the first disaster."

In view of the inevitable calamities, why do tens of millions of Americans, less eccentric than Jefferson, garden? In a column about raising a favorite daffodil, Cantatrice, which he hadn't managed to grow for decades, he writes, "There is authority for the notion that God once spoke through a jackass, a real one with furry ears....And beyond doubt, sometimes through a weather-defiant flower." Mitchell is dumbstruck by his daffodil, as gardeners sometimes are by a certain plant. "What the right flower can do, with luck, is heal the gardener, making him fit (more or less) to love, by steps however slow. Growing old, still in awe, still sitting at her feet."

You plant what you love, even if it's not the right spot or even the right gardening zone. It's okay, because "a garden is what results from years of adjustment in size and successions of enthusiasms." This is a relief. Often when I bring home a longed-for plant - in the now-beheaded hydrangea, Stargazer lilies, a Styrax Japonica - I don't know where it will fit, or what it will look good with. I cringe, because in my favorite garden design book, 100 Great Garden Plants, author William H. Frederick, Jr., warns that when you wedge in a specimen of this or that, you end up not with a garden but a "horticultural zoo." Is each new plant another beast in my zoo? I prefer now to see the garden as a succession of enthusiasms.

Funny and erudite, Mitchell turns a phrase effortlessly. Tree peonies, which he loves, have blossoms the size of soup plates. From once-tiny buds, "these opulent gorgeous flowers spring forth like clowns from a Volkswagen." He dismisses the envied British climate as bleak, saying it is "astonishing they even attempt a garden there, so sunless are their skies." He loves Judd's viburnum, Spanish squills, sedum Autumn Joy, and dazzling little flowers that bloom their heads off, like the roses Polyantha Grandiflora and Mrs. Flight. He forgets to clean the lily pool, loves butterflies and cicadas, and can tell you how to grow dahlias or tomatoes or trumpet vines. He is not a snob; nearly any plant, superbly grown, gives him pleasure. Modern technology, he says, hasn't done much for the home gardener, who still must hand-weed the irises and stake the lilies (he once had 2,500 lilies).

The gardener does these things with pleasure nonetheless. "People like gardening precisely 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." And when they're finished, they like to sit on a couch and read Henry Mitchell.

Vivian Segall writes, and imagines gardens, in Noank, Connecticut.