garden quotes

Alfred Austin: 

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

Amos Bronson Alcott: 

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvest reaps.

Benjamin Disraeli: 

How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.

Dave Barry: 

Your first job is to prepare the soil. The best tool for this is your neighbor's garden tiller. If your neighbor does not own a garden tiller, suggest that he buy one.

Dorothy Frances Gurney: 

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth. "Garden Thoughts"

Elizabeth Murray: 

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.

Emily Dickinson: 

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church, 
I keep it staying at Home - 
With a bobolink for a Chorister, 
And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: 

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Germaine Greer: 

A garden is the best alternative therapy.

Gladys Taber: 

A garden is evidence of faith. It links us with all the misty figures of the past who also planted and were nourished by the fruits of their planting. 
Stillmeadow Sampler 


Helen Hayes: 

All through the long winter, I dream of my garden. On the first day of spring, I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth. I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar.

Henry David Thoreau: 

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

Henry David Thoreau: 

I was determined to know beans. Walden

James Russell Lowell: 

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

John Erskine: 

I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.

Julie Moir Messervy: 

Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof.

Karel Capek: 

Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.

Lewis Gannit: 

Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.

Lou Erickson: 

Gardening requires lots of water -- most of it in the form of perspiration.

Luther Burbank: 

A flower is an educated weed.

Marcel Proust: 

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Margaret Atwood: 

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

May Sarton: 

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

Ogden Nash: 

My garden will never make me famous,
I'm a horticultural ignoramus.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

On every stem, on every leaf ... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part.

Orson Scott Card: 

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

Phyllis McGinley: 

The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying-out of gardens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

Rudyard Kipling: 

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: -- "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.

Sir Walter Scott: 

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

Thich Nhat Hanh: 

May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

Thomas Cooper: 

A garden is never so good as it will be next year

Thomas Fuller: 

No garden is without its weeds.

Thomas Fuller: 

Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there. Gnomologia, 1732

Thomas Jefferson: 

Though an old man I am but a young gardener.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.

Thomas Moore: 

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

Vita Sackville-West: 

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.

Vita Sackville-West: 

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.

Wendell Berry: 

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

William Wordsworth: 

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.