Gardening is awfully good for the soul, but it can be hell on the body.

The former is the stuff of February daydreams. The latter - all that pain from hauling and bending, raking and pruning - fades in winter.

We're in delicious denial till spring.

And then, filled with primordial anticipation, we head outside, only to inflict pain upon ourselves once again.

"Sore muscles come with the territory, but when you get such a positive result, you tend to block that out of your mind," says Winnie Harris, program and volunteer coordinator for University City Green, which has planted thousands of trees and bulbs in West Philadelphia neighborhoods over the last dozen years.

Now here's a gardener we can identify with. "Can't wait to get out there," Harris says, even though summer brings 16-hour workdays with UC Green's youth program, taking care of 500 street trees, plus work in her own garden.

"As one of my girlfriends said to me," Harris confesses, " 'You don't know when you've had enough and you've done too much.' "

To reinvigorate, and to ease the exhaustion and sometime soreness, she soaks, sometimes twice daily, in a tub of steamy water infused with an old-time favorite: Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap.

"Nothing like that peppermint bath," Harris says.

But sometimes peppermint won't cut it, as Patty Brick of Egg Harbor Township knows firsthand. She's a gardener and physical therapist well-acquainted with sore back muscles and injuries to shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands caused by stressful repetitive motion in the garden.

"People are lifting heavy bags of mulch, repotting and replanting, moving shrubs. Everyone's trying to plant these beautiful planters, then lift them up," says Brick, recalling a patient who went hosta-crazy one weekend digging and dividing up a long row of hostas, making new holes, lugging plants from Point A to Point B, and putting them all back in the ground again.

"It's a lot of work for weekend warriors trying to get all their gardening done," Brick says.

Pruning, with its constant and forceful squeezing, is another big-time pain-producer.

"People will go and clean out an entire row of shrubs and not think anything of it, creating that same motion 100 to 200 times," Brick says. "Two days later, their wrist is bothering them and they don't understand the burning in their elbow that's radiating up to the shoulder."

It's called lateral epicondylitis, or tennis elbow.

Time to toss the "weekend warrior" model, which gets a lot done on Saturday and causes miserable immobility on Sunday. Brick has a better idea, one she uses on the flower and vegetable gardens, shrubs, and containers on her own one-acre property.

This is going to sound like your mother telling you to eat right and go to bed early, but there was truth to that and there's truth to this:

Brick sensibly divides the garden chores into manageable bites, in proper sequence; then, using ergonomically designed tools, she paces herself. She cleans out the beds in March, moves things around in April, plants anew in May.

Brick takes her time, making sure to work in two-hour chunks or so, with breaks in between. "Give your muscles and joints a chance to recover from what you've done for the last two hours," she says.

Such admirable organization! Such exemplary self-control!