quotations about gardens & gardening
I don't want to return to the world outside these Gardens. All I want is to notice the dew on a leaf. The holy busyness of worms in the soil.
TOR UDALL
A Thousand Paper Birds
For me the acrid chemical smell of Ortho Rose Dust still has the power to summon an August afternoon in my grandfather's garden. Not terribly romantic, but there it is.
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
What a man needs in gardening is a cast iron back, with a hinge in it.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
My Summer in a Garden
God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
BIBLE
Galatians 6:7
No sooner did I bend over and scratch the soil with the hoe than I began to unearth bits and pieces of my past. Memories forever rooted in time were clustered in my garden consciousness like potatoes, waiting, crying to be dug up.... I plant flowers and vegetables. I harvest memories--and life.
NANCY H. JORDAN
attributed, A Garden of Inspirations
Life is a garden forever in flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Entre-Acte Reveries"
I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.
MARTHA SMITH
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations
The garden, like life, is filled with good guys and bad guys. That is one of the most difficult things for most gardeners to accept. Gardeners are judge and jury when it comes to judging the good guys and the bad guys in their garden.
WINSTON HARDEGREE
Legacy
Feed your farm before it is hungry, and weed your garden before it is foul.
ALOYSIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Behold the flower-garden, and reflect on the number of beauties in this little space; the art and industry of man have made it a charming scene of the finest flowers! But what would it have been without care and culture? A wild desert, full of thistles and thorns.
CHRISTOPH CHRISTIAN STURM
Reflections on the Works of God
The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.
RITA HSIAO
Mulan
If we gardeners are aware of the balance of nature in our gardens, then a lot of our problems will solve themselves. Most pests, especially insects and small mammals, such as voles and moles, get out of control because in our pursuit of perfection, at least our idea of perfection, we destroy their natural enemies.
WINSTON HARDEGREE
Legacy
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
Under a total want of demand except for our family table, I am still devoted to the garden.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Charles W. Peale, August 20, 1811
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"
Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place. They lessen our dependence on distant sources of energy, technology, food, and, for that matter, interest. For if lawn mowing feels like copying the same sentence over and over, gardening is like writing out new ones, an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery.
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
For the main garden, I do not deny, but there should be some fair alleys ranged on both sides, with fruit-trees; and some pretty tufts of fruit-trees, and arbors with seats, set in some decent order; but these to be by no means set too thick; but to leave the main garden so as it be not close, but the air open and free. For as for shade, I would have you rest upon the alleys of the side grounds, there to walk, if you be disposed, in the heat of the year or day; but to make account, that the main garden is for the more temperate parts of the year; and in the heat of summer, for the morning and the evening, or overcast days.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Gardens", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
As gardening has been the inclination of kings and the choice of philosophers, so it has been the common favorite of public and private men; a pleasure of the greatest, and a care of the meanest; and indeed an employment and a possession, for which no man is too high nor too low.
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE
Upon the Gardens of Epicurus
The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made.
STEPHEN M. IRWIN
The Dead Path