Having been raised by survivors of the Great Depression, I am a saver. Whenever I’m teetering on the brink of discarding something iffy I hear my Scottish grandfather chide “It’d cost a lot of money if you had to buy it.” (Nobody, alas, ever questioned the likelihood of such a purchase.) When household oddments are viewed through the prism of gardening potential, a clinical diagnosis could label the effect on a dyed-in-the-wool saver.

The scope of my discard impairment registered when I began using a serger. What right-thinking pack rat could throw away yards of perfectly good selvage (which, after all, is only one vowel removed from salvage)? Neatly rolled and tucked into plastic sandwich bags, selvages will make first-rate plant ties. Come to think of it, the narrower bits could be snipped into safe lengths and strewn about for the birds. I can’t wait to see my first calico nest!

In the same way that a single sale flier can form the nucleus of a towering infernal on a freshly-tidied counter top, one empty plant four-pack can condemn the potting shed to chaos. Where there are four-packs, there are, of course, six-packs in a surprising variety of depths and widths. I round up plenty of shallow cartons for sorting all the variations on a plant-starting theme. Greenhouse friends will thank me for my largesse which now includes columns of plastic pots sorted by size, shape, color, and texture. (I don’t care to mix ribbed black pots with smooth green ones even if they are the same size. Collectors have standards, you know.) I’ll keep the cute squatty pots; they’d cost a lot of money if I had to buy ‘em.

Jasmine, our late, lamented pet rabbit inspired such a collection that house guests refer to their accommodations as the hutch. Outdoors, Jasmine’s influence can be observed in the form of a rabbit rock, terra cotta figures, a shelf, whimsical pots and every hare-brained gimcrack and gewgaw that friends and family encounter in their travels. By extension, any furry, perky-eared plant finds a niche in my gardens, especially if it elicits an unabashed “Awwww.”

Even plant collections have a way of sneaking up and catching a gardener unaware. A neighbor with a passion for daylilies favored me with a gift plant before we’d left our old home. Six years later I have ten daylily beds and choice daylily accents as far as the eye can see. Where once I was vaguely aware that the genus came in more colors and sizes than orange and tall, I now find myself poring over daylily catalogs and yearning for pie crust edges, daybreak color blending, and elegant watermarks. Who knew?

No gardener worth her salt can resist tools, and since I have a serious problem keeping track of them, my tool collection takes a fascinating direction. Most of the spiffy new hand tools hanging neatly in the potting shed have scruffy counterparts that surface when I turn compost or remember a long-neglected section of the thug border. I plunk the battered assortment into an old basket that I carry on days when the task at hand is grubby or the gardener is too scatterbrained to be trusted with choice equipment.

I find that just as gardens evolve toward simplicity, tool selection matures with time and experience. In the early days of gardening, I was dazzled by novelty and tried every approach to the processes of opening, weeding, fluffing, and carrying soil. With a young back and an experimental frame of mind, I tried hoes, trowels, forks, spades, wheelbarrows, carts, and specialized tools that could have sprung from the minds of Martians. Some of the funkier examples make interesting plant stakes in the galvanized washtubs I also found irresistible. Now I could conduct most gardening business with a sturdy border fork, my trusty Japanese farmer’s knife, and an English weeding basket (the last word in form and function).

Scanning a gardener’s journal would probably be less revealing than a leisurely tour of garden and tool shed. The story of a gardener’s life is writ large in the plants, accessories, and tools we gather around us. The components might indeed cost a lot of money if we had to buy them, but most collections are so imbued with memory and experience that they couldn’t be bought at any price.