quotations about gardens & gardening
A garden is never so good as it will be next year.
THOMAS COOPER
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
I like gardening -- it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
ALICE SEBOLD
attributed, Inspirations in the Garden
I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair, and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
AMY LOWELL
Patterns
A garden always has a point.
ELIZABETH HOYT
The Raven Prince
Now 'tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden,
And choke the herbs for want of husbandry.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry VI
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 is like a big family. The plants all live and grow together. Some are big. Some are small. But all of them are special. All of them have a story.
MARY A. AGRIA
Second Leaves
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
Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.
WENDELL BERRY
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation.
PHYLLIS THEROUX
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations
Sometimes when you think the storm is coming to rain on your parade, it's actually there to water your garden.
ANONYMOUS
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
A garden is a beautiful book, written by the finger of God; every flower and every leaf is a letter.
DOUGLAS JERROLD
attributed, The Christian Repository, 1859
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
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
No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
Though an old man, I am but a young gardener.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Charles W. Peale, August 20, 1811
The less help you have in your garden, the more it belongs to you.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture's boot.
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Were it not for one's mistakes, one's failures, and one's disappointments, the love one bears one's garden would soon perish for lack of sustenance. Just as you may admire but can scarcely feel tenderly towards uniformly successful people, so for a garden that was always and everywhere equally gaudy or equally green you might entertain wonder, but you would hardly cherish affection. It is one's failures in life that make one gentle and forgiving with oneself; and I almost think it is the failures of others that mostly endear them to us. The Garden that I Love is very perverse, very incalculable in its ways--falling at times as much below expectations as at others exceeding it. They who have no patience with accident, with waywardness, should not attempt to garden.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love