quotations about gardens & gardening
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"
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
Sometimes when you think the storm is coming to rain on your parade, it's actually there to water your garden.
ANONYMOUS
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
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
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
A garden always has a point.
ELIZABETH HOYT
The Raven Prince
No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
A weed is but an unloved flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"The Weed", New Thought Pastels
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
Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard III
Nothing discourages the amateur gardener like watching his family eat the entire garden at one meal.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Gardens are simultaneously real places and representations. They bring together, in one place, nature and out ideas about nature.
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade.
RUDYARD KIPLING
"The Glory of the Garden", Rudyard Kipling's Verse
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
Enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children.
J. M. COETZEE
Life and Times of Michael K
The best thing about gardening is that if you put it off long enough, it won't be necessary.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
My garden is a forest ledge
Which older forests bound;
The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,
Then plunge to depths profound!
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
My Garden