quotations about gardens & gardening
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
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
Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible.
ANNE WAREHAM
The Bad Tempered Gardener
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"
A garden rests the soul, and cheers the heart.
R. J. DODGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
What a man needs in gardening is a cast iron back, with a hinge in it.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
My Summer in a Garden
I am convinced that weeds are just herbs we've not found a use for yet.
TRISTAN GYLBERD
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
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
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
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
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
God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
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
When I die, bury me with a few garden tools, I shall make a garden in the heaven too.
PREETH NAMBIAR
The Solitary Shores
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
A garden is never so good as it will be next year.
THOMAS COOPER
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
A garden is not a place: it is a passage, a passion. We don't know where we're going; to pass through is enough; to pass through is to remain.
OCTAVIO PAZ
"A Tale of Two Gardens"
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
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?
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