Quotes & Sayings About Garden Design

A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape. — William Shenstone

Landscape design theory has been rotting away, peacefully, like a garden temple, since the close of the eighteenth century. — Tom Turner

From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate. — Tom Turner

Garden design theory explains, or should explain, the 'What, Where, Why and How' of making gardens. — Tom Turner

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden. — Stephen Gardiner

Charles Jencks is the most notable landscape and garden designer to carry forward the 3500 BCE-1800CE landscape and garden design agenda. — Tom Turner

Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it's appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished. — W.S. Merwin

The tragedy of feminine design is that it receives so little official support. Most of the world's design schools, having been organized by men, encourage a masculine approach, even when they are run by women. Yet many designers who are male in the biological sense have a feminine approach to design. — Tom Turner

I've known Jennifer [Salke] for so long. Before I was a writer, I did garden design, and I designed Jennifer's garden, many years ago. I've known her for a really long time. So the pitch was not really about that. — Ryan T. Murphy

The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context. — Tom Turner

The Japanese garden is a very important tool in Japanese architectural design because, not only is a garden traditionally included in any house design, the garden itself also reflects a deeper set of cultural meanings and traditions. Whereas the English garden seeks to make only an aesthetic impression, the Japanese garden is both aesthetic and reflective. The most basic element of any Japanese garden design comes from the realization that every detail has a significant value. — E. J. W. Barber

The coming together of a man and woman was a holy thing, after all. God had chosen this way of replenishing the earth. God did everything so elegantly, with such an exquisite attention to detail. She knew this from studying the flowers in the garden and watching the morning sky, all mauve and pink and orange. So beautiful. But God had looked at all this, His ideas, His wonderful sense of color and design put into action, and had said merely that it was good. Not great. Not fantastic. Just good. But when He had looked at man and woman together, He had said it was "very good". — Naomi Ragen

Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere. — Tom Turner

British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology. — Tom Turner

~A Rose~

In a rose can you see God's finger prints

of eternity
of creation
of design
of uniqueness
of passion
of pure love
of silent beauty
of gentle charm
of warmth
of sweet scent
of an array of color

In God's garden a rose grows
a dazzling love gift we share with God
heart to heart hand in hand
God The Master Gardener of our souls. — Charles W. Warner

Humphry Repton, the leading garden theorist of the nineteenth century, defined a garden as 'a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure or man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated and enriched by art'. — Tom Turner

Every person sees the world through lenses of his or her own design - individual goggles that alter focus and perspective as desired. For those who wish the world to be dark and ugly and unapproachable, it is. But for those who wish it to be beautiful, it is a garden playground blooming with bright, happy colors. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Designing a landscape is about connecting the body, soul and mind to the land itself. — Kathryn Gustafson

In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life. — Luis Barragan

Many of the world's best-designed cities have been inspired by garden concepts. — Tom Turner

There is much to learn about what could happen in the gardens of the future, should designers wish to learn about the past. — Tom Turner

The more contemplative gardener, seeing the garden as a whole, the design of it, and its nature as a still place of delight and refreshment, will wait and hope for the moment when it seems to achieve perfection. Awareness of when such moments are most likely helps to make them happen; they will not be entirely accidental but anticipated; everything will be planned to encourage them. — Susan Hill

The aim of forest garden design is to make the relationships as co-operative as possible, while acknowledging that very few plants will yield quite as much as they would if they were living alone. It is the cumulative yield of all the plants living on the same piece of land that makes forest gardens productive, not the high yield of individuals. — Patrick Whitefield

In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem. — William Shenstone

The thing that's important is not something called design; it's how you live, its life itself. Design really comes from that. You cannot separate what you do from your life. — Dan Kiley

Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition. — Tom Turner

Garden design is all about concealment and surprise. — Andrew Crofts

And God was like, "It's not a tumor. That's your appendix. Appendixes go at the end. Read a book, dude." Then Adam was all, "Really? Because I don't want to second-guess you but it seems like a design flaw. Also that snake in the garden told me it doesn't even do anything." And God shook his head and muttered, "Jesus, that fucking snake is like TMZ." And then Adam was like, "Who's Jesus?" and God said, "No one yet. It's just an idea I'm throwing around." And — Jenny Lawson

The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia. — Tom Turner

In a rock garden we foster a little patch of the wilderness that stands to us for freedom. — Jason Hill

I rebuke societies that impart to their flowers their cold and rigid demeanour. Flowers should not stand with the stiffness of a soldier on parade but must carry themselves with the relaxedness of a dancer, their arms outstretched above a shaggy mane. Life reveals few sights as distressing as the look of flowers standing mournfully at attention unstirred by the kisses of a million bees. This infection of uncomely reserve is the handiwork of sombre gardeners bred in sombre societies who will not consider their work done till their flowers exude in aspect that stiffness they esteem. They forget that God intended that we mingle with flowers and not merely admire them from afar. But there is a look in a fastidiously manicured garden that makes me keep my distance, a look that draws my eyes but scorns my touch, and that is why I condemn them. — Agona Apell

Any tendency to design for design's sake, to create a pattern within which the owner must live according to rules set by the designer, is headed for frustration, if not disaster. — Thomas Haden Church

Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive; you will be able to design a house together with your family; a garden for your children; places where you can work; beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream. — Christopher Alexander

Having lasted for 4,000 years, the use of nature's materials to express ideas about nature may be expected to continue. The best garden designs are produced with an awareness of the art, science, history, geography, philosophy, social habits and construction techniques of their period. — Tom Turner

There are many possible approaches to Australian garden design, and they all reflect the designer's individual response to gardens. For my part, I love all things most gardeners abhor ... I like the whole thing to be as wild as possible, so that you have to fight your way through in places ... — Edna Walling

I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years. — Danielle Dutton

When I am designing, my aim is to create tension and then gradually proceed into quiet. — Jacques Wirtz

Anya had never seen a house uglier house than Baba Yaga's. It was made entirely of mouldy bones in the same interlocking design as a log cabin. A thorny garden grew as high as the fence and skulls, bleached white by the sun, capped each fence post. Two enormous scaly chicken legs came out on either side of the house. Anya snorted in amusement and disgust. Yvan, she noticed, had turned an interesting shade of grey. — Amy Kuivalainen

Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything. — Tom Turner

A garden without its statue is like a sentence without its verb. — Joseph Beach

Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature. — Penelope Hobhouse