quotations about gardens & gardening
What a man needs in gardening is a cast iron back, with a hinge in it.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
My Summer in a Garden
The best way to raise a successful garden is by trowel and error.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible.
ANNE WAREHAM
The Bad Tempered Gardener
I am convinced that weeds are just herbs we've not found a use for yet.
TRISTAN GYLBERD
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
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
Gardens. The word is overcharged with meaning;
It speaks of moonlight and a closing door;
Of birds at dawn--of sultry afternoons.
Gardens. I seem to see low branches screening
A vine-roofed arbor with a leaf-tiled floor
Where sunlight swoons.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Stairways and Gardens", World Voices
I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.
MARTHA SMITH
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations
There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.
JANET KILBURN PHILLIPS
attributed, The Garden of Inspiration
Looking after a garden is like looking after children. Feed plants and they grow, neglect them and they suffer. It's all rewards and punishments.
FAY WELDON
The Cloning of Joanna May
When I die, bury me with a few garden tools, I shall make a garden in the heaven too.
PREETH NAMBIAR
The Solitary Shores
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
We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives.
PARKER J. PALMER
Let Your Life Speak
I like gardening -- it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
ALICE SEBOLD
attributed, Inspirations in the Garden
Gardening is a metaphor for life, teaching you to nourish new life and weed out that which cannot succeed.
NELSON MANDELA
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
Like Oberon's meadows her garden is
Drowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.
Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,
And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;
And all she has is all she needs --
A poor Old Widow in her weeds.
WALTER DE LA MARE
"A Widow's Weeds"
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
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 rests the soul, and cheers the heart.
R. J. DODGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Though an old man, I am but a young gardener.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Charles W. Peale, August 20, 1811