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
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 am convinced that weeds are just herbs we've not found a use for yet.
TRISTAN GYLBERD
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.
RITA HSIAO
Mulan
Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
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
Feed your farm before it is hungry, and weed your garden before it is foul.
ALOYSIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
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
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
When I die, bury me with a few garden tools, I shall make a garden in the heaven too.
PREETH NAMBIAR
The Solitary Shores
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"
A garden rests the soul, and cheers the heart.
R. J. DODGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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"
If we are to include gardens potentially within the arts we would also have to observe that gardening is usually a self-taught skill, with a little help from the "experts". The solitary nature of most garden learning must limit exposure to serious teaching and to other learners--people who might challenge preconceptions and introduce the learner to new ideas and to previous masters of the art.
ANNE WAREHAM
The Bad Tempered Gardener