I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.

Erskine links manual, rhythmic outdoor work with sustained intellectual fertility. The garden becomes a counterpoint to desk-bound effort: repetitive physical tasks, fresh air, and contact with living processes can quiet self-conscious striving and let ideas surface more freely. The remark also implies a discipline of attention—gardening requires patience, observation, and responsiveness to seasons—which can translate into clearer thinking and better creative judgment. In a broader modern sense, the quote anticipates later arguments about “embodied cognition”: that the mind works differently (often better for invention) when the body is engaged in low-stakes, nonverbal activity.