quotations about gardens & gardening
No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
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 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?
I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair, and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
AMY LOWELL
Patterns
The chief objection to gardening is that by the time your back gets used to it, your enthusiasm is gone.
BOB PHILLIPS
Phillips' Treasury of Humorous Quotations
For there is no gardening without humility, an assiduous willingness to learn, and a cheerful readiness to confess you were mistaken. Nature is continually sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
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 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"
A garden always has a point.
ELIZABETH HOYT
The Raven Prince
Every resident of village or suburb who owns or occupies a rod square of mother earth, should have a garden; it pays largely in health and pleasure.
D. D. T. MOORE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The best way to raise a successful garden is by trowel and error.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Gardening is like the rest of life--there's a fine line between optimism and lunacy.
CONNIE CRONLEY
Poke a Stick at It: Unexpected True Stories
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 weed is but an unloved flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"The Weed", New Thought Pastels
In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener.
ROBERT RODALE
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
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
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
Sometimes when you think the storm is coming to rain on your parade, it's actually there to water your garden.
ANONYMOUS
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
Do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet