quotations about gardens & gardening
A garden is not a place: it is a passage, a passion. We don't know where we're going; to pass through is enough; to pass through is to remain.
OCTAVIO PAZ
"A Tale of Two Gardens"
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
MAY SARTON
Journal of a Solitude
Sometimes when you think the storm is coming to rain on your parade, it's actually there to water your garden.
ANONYMOUS
For there is no gardening without humility, an assiduous willingness to learn, and a cheerful readiness to confess you were mistaken. Nature is continually sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
Once learn how Nature gardens for herself, and you will be able to spare yourself a good deal of trouble.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
Do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
oration read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association at the Masonic Temple in Boston, MA, "Man the Reformer"
A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
The best way to raise a successful garden is by trowel and error.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Gardening is like the rest of life--there's a fine line between optimism and lunacy.
CONNIE CRONLEY
Poke a Stick at It: Unexpected True Stories
The chief objection to gardening is that by the time your back gets used to it, your enthusiasm is gone.
BOB PHILLIPS
Phillips' Treasury of Humorous Quotations
My garden is a lovesome thing--God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Fern grot--
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not.
Not God in gardens! When the sun is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign!
'Tis very sure God walks in mine.
THOMAS EDWARD BROWN
My Garden
The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
As everybody knows, it is not so much the eye that summons the gardens of childhood, but the nose. What memoir of childhood doesn't at some point turn on the scent of a sweet pea or a freshly cut lawn or boxwood hedge, to leap the fence of years?
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
The art of gardening is like the art of writing, of painting, of sculpture; it is the art of composing, and making a harmony, with disparate elements.
IAN HAMILTON FINLAY
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections
We all go back to the soil eventually, but only the gardener does it while he's still alive.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
A weed is but an unloved flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"The Weed", New Thought Pastels
Many serious gardeners also place children in the category of garden pests. I'm a serious gardener and I not only allow, but I encourage, children to play in my gardens. I think it's a good place for them to learn that not everything people call bad is bad and that not everything that people call good is good.
WINSTON HARDEGREE
Legacy
Though an old man, I am but a young gardener.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Charles W. Peale, August 20, 1811