Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty : Finishing Line Press : 9781635342086 : 1635342082 : 14 Apr 2017 : The poems in "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" discover a universe in a perennial flower garden. A reporter and a novelist, Robert Knox's poems are as immediate as today and as universal as the weather. The characters in these poems are May and September, roses, asters, morning glory, anemone, honey bees, squirrels and hummingbirds. The poems followed a garden lover's decision to dig up all the grass at his Boston area home and plant flowers, both perennials and annuals, ground covers, shrubs, a small tree or two, berry bushes, and vegetables. To be an amateur means to do something not for money, but for love. A few summers later the garden blossomed, and the poems grew from the voices heard while tending the plants, pulling weeds, trimming old growth, planting anew. While Knox is an amateur gardener, he's a professional writer, with a thousand bylines in the Boston Globe a