I got a little house in East L.A. and did the gardening. I was doing some acting here and there doing my own thing... getting back to reality.

I do the gardening.

In the world at large people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden cause and effect labor and reward are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension then the more gardens in the world the more justice the more sense is created.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

I am a particular fan of integrative exercise - that is exercise that occurs in the course of doing some productive activity such as gardening bicycling to work doing home improvement projects and so on.

I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news but in hindsight I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.

I loathe gardening but I love gardens and I have two beautiful gardens. I can not bear gardening but I love gardens.

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination how can we be very far from the beginning?

Garden as though you will live forever.