quotations about gardens & gardening
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
Were it not for one's mistakes, one's failures, and one's disappointments, the love one bears one's garden would soon perish for lack of sustenance. Just as you may admire but can scarcely feel tenderly towards uniformly successful people, so for a garden that was always and everywhere equally gaudy or equally green you might entertain wonder, but you would hardly cherish affection. It is one's failures in life that make one gentle and forgiving with oneself; and I almost think it is the failures of others that mostly endear them to us. The Garden that I Love is very perverse, very incalculable in its ways--falling at times as much below expectations as at others exceeding it. They who have no patience with accident, with waywardness, should not attempt to garden.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
A garden always has a point.
ELIZABETH HOYT
The Raven Prince
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
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
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
No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
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
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 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
Nothing discourages the amateur gardener like watching his family eat the entire garden at one meal.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
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
Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard III
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
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
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
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
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