Taken from The Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
Written by Alan Hickman

The gods of Olympus ever were a fickle lot. The Acropolis may be in ruins and the great statue of Athena may be long gone from the Parthenon, but the shades of Zeus and his dysfunctional family are having a jolly time meddling in the affairs of the mortals gathered in Athens for the quadrennial games.
The mighty have been tripped up, struck down and pushed over, but the gods have not had things entirely their own way. In other times, the struggle between gymnast Paul Hamm, winner of the individual all-around world title in 2003, and some unseen capricious hand would be the stuff of which legends were made.
For the record, Hamm and China's Yang Wei were vying for first place when, on the fourth rotation - the vault, Hamm missed the landing, staggered sideways and crashed on his back against the judges'table. In a blink, he went from first place to twelfth. The American commentators wrote Hamm off in an instant and while the Canadians were a little more humane, they did opine that, with only two rotations remaining, it would take a near miracle to make a come-back.
On the fifth rotation - parallel bars - Hamm managed the performance of a lifetime, to move from twelfth into fourth place, while Yang Wei made the slightest of errors and dropped out of contention. On the final rotation, the high bar, Hamm threw himself into his routine like a man possessed.
With the arena in uproar, when the final marks came in Hamm had the gold medal. Somehow, from the sickening despair of defeat, Paul Hamm had pulled victory. If ever there was a triumph of will, this was that time.
All very inspiring - applause, applause - but what, you may well wonder, does any of this have to do with a garden? Well, the parallels are very close. Gardens, like sports, are about the people who create them. The plants and the landscape, like footballs and vaulting tables, are merely the 'apparatus'. Gardens are about dreams of what might be, about years of work and persistence, and gardens are about defying the odds.
A hundred years ago Jennie and Robert Pimm Butchart moved from Ontario to Todd Inlet on Vancouver Island. Robert owned a cement factory, the raw material for which came from a limestone quarry nearby the family's house. For Jennie, when the stone was exhausted, the remaining ugly industrial pit which scarred the landscape was both a challenge and an inspiration. Carts and horses hauled untold loads of soil into the quarry bottom and gradually a great sunken garden took shape. The renown of Jennie Butchart's garden quickly grew so that by the 1920's, fifty thousand people a year were coming to visit. In this the garden's centennial year, the gardens will receive more than a million visitors who come to share the results of one amateur gardener's dream.
In 1930 when Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson first visited Sissinghurst, in the county of Kent in south-east England, there was little to see but a few ruinous buildings surrounded by derelict farmland. For the price of the property and the cost of renovations to make the buildings even liveable, they could have purchased a beautiful residence with all the conveniences then considered modern. They acquired the estate in May, but it was not until 1932 that Harold and Vita could move in and begin their love affair with the landscape. Over the rest of their lives, their passion resulted in what became one of the great gardens of Britain.
Much closer to home, in the 1970's when a couple of Toronto boys decided to rent a bit of a hayfield and a leaky shack down a side-road on the Bruce Peninsula, they could hardly have known what they were getting in to. Within a decade, Patrick Lima - the writer - and John Scanlan - the photographer - had created Larkwhistle. Despite being in zone 3, with winter temperatures falling to minus 40 degrees, gale-force winds off the lakes and enough snow to bury a house, the garden produces bloom which would be an achievement even in balmy Brampton. Larkwhistle is not a 'Grand'garden in the style of Sissinghurst or Butchart but it is a much-visited gem in its own right. The garden is a tribute to tenacity and determination in the face of hardships which would have sent most people scurrying back to the security of the city.
As this column is written, the gods had still not finished with the saga of Paul Hamm. Turns out that the bronze medal winner had been under-scored on one routine and that he should have won the gold and Hamm the silver! If, three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks had had the benefit of radio, perhaps they wouldn't have modeled their pantheon on the Bickersons.