The Burren is an extraordinary—and strange—place. Miles and miles of hills are covered in limestone, like the paving of some old gods...Here, wildflowers grow, sheep pick their way through, grasses wave, and stone walls are built by locals...To be in the Burren is to bear witness to the unexpected ways that the particularity of place opens you to the world.
Ultimately, I think gardening speaks to a deep-seated desire to experience the real, the essential, the astonishingly possible. To garden is gradually to give up control, to fall literally to one's knees and come into closer and closer contact with the tremendous and often bewildering beauty of the world. Nothing, you find, is at all what you thought it was. Dirt is not dirt, but a teeming mass of microorganisms that turns death back into life.
