Success Quote by Francis Cabot Lowell

Ambition, here, isn’t the swaggering kind that ends in monuments. It’s the slow-burn hunger of a person who has tried to bend time with living things and lost - gladly. Lowell frames gardening as a project that is structurally unfinished: plants outlast plans, seasons revise intentions, weather humiliates certainty. “One lifetime is never enough” lands like a confession from someone who’s discovered that the point isn’t completion but sustained attention. The line turns mortality into a practical constraint, the way a gardener thinks: not as tragic abstraction, but as a calendar that runs out.

The second sentence is the sly pivot. Calling a garden “a site for the imagination” elevates horticulture from property management to inner life. It’s also a quiet defense against the era’s merchant logic. Lowell, a businessman in the early American republic, would have lived amid a culture obsessed with enterprise, legacy, and measurable gain. The garden becomes his counter-economy: value that can’t be cashed out, only tended. If imagination is what’s being cultivated, “how can we be very far from the beginning?” isn’t naïve optimism; it’s a deliberate reframing. The beginning is not a starting line you leave behind but a state you return to whenever you design, replant, or admit you were wrong.

Subtext: mastery is a mirage, and that’s liberation. The garden offers a rare permission slip for adults - especially successful ones - to remain apprentices forever.