quotations about gardens & gardening
No sooner did I bend over and scratch the soil with the hoe than I began to unearth bits and pieces of my past. Memories forever rooted in time were clustered in my garden consciousness like potatoes, waiting, crying to be dug up.... I plant flowers and vegetables. I harvest memories--and life.
NANCY H. JORDAN
attributed, A Garden of Inspirations
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
Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible.
ANNE WAREHAM
The Bad Tempered Gardener
As gardening has been the inclination of kings and the choice of philosophers, so it has been the common favorite of public and private men; a pleasure of the greatest, and a care of the meanest; and indeed an employment and a possession, for which no man is too high nor too low.
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE
Upon the Gardens of Epicurus
Feed your farm before it is hungry, and weed your garden before it is foul.
ALOYSIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Like Oberon's meadows her garden is
Drowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.
Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,
And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;
And all she has is all she needs --
A poor Old Widow in her weeds.
WALTER DE LA MARE
"A Widow's Weeds"
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
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
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
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
The gardener gives space and freedom to young plants, that they may grow and spread forth their sweet branches, and so should masters provide indulgence for the young, who, by oblation, are planted in the garden of the church, that they increase and bear fruit to God.
ST. ANSELM
attributed, Day's Collacon
The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.
RITA HSIAO
Mulan
I am convinced that weeds are just herbs we've not found a use for yet.
TRISTAN GYLBERD
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
A garden is never so good as it will be next year.
THOMAS COOPER
attributed, A Garden of Inspiration
A garden rests the soul, and cheers the heart.
R. J. DODGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
When I die, bury me with a few garden tools, I shall make a garden in the heaven too.
PREETH NAMBIAR
The Solitary Shores
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
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
No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love