quotations about gardens & gardening
A weed is but an unloved flower.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"The Weed", New Thought Pastels
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
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
Once learn how Nature gardens for herself, and you will be able to spare yourself a good deal of trouble.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
Nothing discourages the amateur gardener like watching his family eat the entire garden at one meal.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
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
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
Many serious gardeners also place children in the category of garden pests. I'm a serious gardener and I not only allow, but I encourage, children to play in my gardens. I think it's a good place for them to learn that not everything people call bad is bad and that not everything that people call good is good.
WINSTON HARDEGREE
Legacy
Though an old man, I am but a young gardener.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Charles W. Peale, August 20, 1811
We all go back to the soil eventually, but only the gardener does it while he's still alive.
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
A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
The art of gardening is like the art of writing, of painting, of sculpture; it is the art of composing, and making a harmony, with disparate elements.
IAN HAMILTON FINLAY
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections
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
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
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
Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard III
The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.
MICHAEL POLLAN
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
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