quotations about gardens & gardening
A garden is never so good as it will be next year.
THOMAS COOPER
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
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 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 always has a point.
ELIZABETH HOYT
The Raven Prince
I like gardening -- it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
ALICE SEBOLD
attributed, Inspirations in the Garden
The less help you have in your garden, the more it belongs to you.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
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
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
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
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
No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
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 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
A person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.
LIBERTY HYDE BAILEY
The Pruning-Book
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
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
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
One moment alone in the garden,
Under the August skies;
The moon had gone but the stars shone on--
Shone like your beautiful eyes.
Away from the glitter and gaslight,
Alone in the garden there,
While the mirth of the throng, in laugh and song,
Floated out on the air.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"In the Garden", Poems of 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