quotations about gardens & gardening
A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, some for a long time, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future.
W. S. MERWIN
What Is a Garden?
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
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
Do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
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
Sometimes when you think the storm is coming to rain on your parade, it's actually there to water your garden.
ANONYMOUS
The best way to raise a successful garden is by trowel and error.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
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
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
A weed is but an unloved flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"The Weed", New Thought Pastels
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
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 garden always has a point.
ELIZABETH HOYT
The Raven Prince
A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
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
Every resident of village or suburb who owns or occupies a rod square of mother earth, should have a garden; it pays largely in health and pleasure.
D. D. T. MOORE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
If we are to include gardens potentially within the arts we would also have to observe that gardening is usually a self-taught skill, with a little help from the "experts". The solitary nature of most garden learning must limit exposure to serious teaching and to other learners--people who might challenge preconceptions and introduce the learner to new ideas and to previous masters of the art.
ANNE WAREHAM
The Bad Tempered Gardener
In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener.
ROBERT RODALE
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration