It's been over fifty years since I bought my first plant at a greenhouse. The greenhouse was about halfway between Quarryville and the Buck and was operated by an older man with the last name of Lewis. Of course when you are eight or ten, most people looked older.

The plant was a passion vine that, at seventy-five cents, was expensive at the time. I think it was on the second trip to get vegetable plants that Dad gave in and I had a plant I was in love with.

To this day I can take you to the exact spot where I planted and watched it flourish. Despite being an annual I managed to take cuttings to keep it going for several years.

A lot of plants find their way to gardens because their new owner falls in love with them. You find a plant that you must have and then you find a place to put it. That works. For want of a better term, and to fulfill my promise from last week, I will call that level one gardening.

Even the most sophisticated gardeners will join the beginner gardener doing this. If you pay attention to the cultural needs of the plant, you will be successful with love.

The next level, in my mind, is a variation of level one. This time you either save your pennies and do more damage less often or increase your budget. Many times have I accumulated ten or a dozen or more plants and set them around a garden site.

They would be moved until I was happy with the look I had and then I would plant them. Here I pause to relate one of my favorite stories.

In late March of 1993 we were struggling to open our relocated business. It was a terribly wet spring and the paths to our greenhouses were more mud that walks. I remember churning through the mud with my largest leftover farm tractor dumping bucket after bucket of stones into the mud where walks should be.

I succeeded with the walks, but left a terrible mess beside them. Of course we opened and did some business, and the rutted mess I had left behind was temporarily ignored.

After the spring season my attention returned to this hopeless mess. I had a few torn bags of peat moss that hadn't sold. I drug them across the ruts and went for the rototillar. That done I scoured the perennial greenhouses for leftover plants which, of course, I planted with a minimum of thought.

The clincher to this whole story is that, within a year, dozens of people asked me who had designed the garden. I chuckled but not in their presence.

Gardening does not have to be complicated to be enjoyable. Even the most professional garden designer will admit that some of their biggest successes have been accidents.

Again, I am getting long so will continue next week with three more levels to think about. In the meantime I suggest that as you travel or visit gardens, look for ideas or plant combinations that you like.

My latest find was the combination of the native small leafed evergreen holly, Ilex glabra, with the grass, Miscanthus purpurea, that turns red in the fall. That one is in front of the rental place on Route 222 just north of Quarryville.