Garden Gardening Quotes & Sayings

You're not a gardener, are you? So perhaps you don't know that once a garden is established, much of good gardening is about removal rather than planting, honing what you have to produce a pleasing effect, sacrificing the particular for the good of the whole. Gardening is a creative pastime, but the result is always a work in progress; unlike a painting or a piece of music a garden is never fixed in time. ("In The Garden") — Rosalie Parker

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. — Michael Pollan

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

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 robin was tremendously busy. He was very much pleased to see gardening begun on his own estate. He had often wondered at Ben Weatherstaff. Where gardening is done all sorts of delightful things to eat are turned up with the soil. Now here was this new kind of creature who was not half Ben's size and yet had had the sense to come into his garden and begin at once. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

I've always felt that having a garden is like having a good and loyal friend. — C. Z. Guest

Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job. — George Bernard Shaw

It is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about gardening. You have got to love your garden whether you like it or not. — W.C. Sellar

I think if we all gardened more, they and all of the other birds that fly in the air above and light in my garden below would be better off. I know that God values them no less than I do. So when I plant in spring I also hope to taste of God in fruit of summer sun and sight of feathered friends. — Vigen Guroian

Sometimes he dug in his garden; again, he read or wrote. He had but one word for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. "The mind is a garden," said he. — Victor Hugo

Gardening is always more or less a warfare against nature. It is true we go over to the 'other side' for a few hints, but we might as well abandon our spades and pitchforks as pretend that nature is everything and art nothing. — Shirley Hibberd

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself. — Roberto Burle Marx

But if each man could have his own house, a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings - then, I thought, there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life. — George Cadbury

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts. — Michael Pollan

Go out by yourself, face the wind, hold up your head and thank God for this gardening year. — Richardson Wright

Spring time is nature at its best. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness. — Michael Pollan

It's true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else. — Viggo Mortensen

I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards. — Jamaica Kincaid

If the art of gardening is at last to turn back from her extravagances and rest with her other sisters, it is, above everything, necessary to have clearly before you what you require ... It is certainly tasteless and inconsistent to desire to encompass the world with a garden-wall, but very practicable and reasonable to make a garden ... into a characteristic whole to the eye, heart, and nderstanding alike. — Friedrich Schiller

I'd love to see a new form of social security ... everyone taught how to grow their own; fruit and nut trees planted along every street, parks planted out to edibles, every high rise with a roof garden, every school with at least one fruit tree for every kid enrolled. — Jackie French

But for one's health as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing. — Vincent Van Gogh

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Garden making, like gardening itself, concerns the relationship of the human being to his natural surroundings. — Russell Page

Everyone wants instant everything, and they want instant success, but I always think you should treat things in the arts like a garden, and let them grow. — Penelope Keith

A gardin is where you can find a whole spectrum of life, birth and death — Tiffany Baker

Gardening is a humbling experience. — Martha Stewart

I grew up at my grandmother's house, and she had a beautiful garden. I used to hate mowing the lawn and weeding, which is what you do when you're a kid. I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens. — Elton John

I'm mad about gardening. I have an allotment on the other side of Hampstead Heath, and I keep three hens in my garden. — Deborah Moggach

That small circle of earth became a second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts. — Paul Fleischman

Gardening gave me a way to work with silence; not "in silence" but "with silence" - it was a silent creativity. — Sara Maitland

Ah, this delicious night air,' she said, luxuriously sniffing in the coolness. 'Night air and gardening are the great tonics. There is nothing so stimulating as bare contact with rich mother earth. You are never so fresh as when you have been grubbing in the soil - black hands, black nails, and boots covered with mud.' She gave her great jovial laugh.

'I'm a glutton for air and earth,' she said. 'Positively I look forward to death, for then I shall be buried and have the kind earth all round me. No leaden caskets for me - I have given explicit directions. But what shall I do about air? Well, I suppose one can't have everything.'

("Mrs. Amworth") — E.F. Benson

A poor old Widow in her weeds
Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;
Not too shallow, and not too deep,
And down came April -- drip -- drip -- drip.
Up shone May, like gold, and soon
Green as an arbour grew leafy June.
And now all summer she sits and sews
Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,
Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet,
Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;
Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;
Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;
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

For more than thirty years, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd have been gardening with extraordinary, indeed legendary, results. Part memoir, part omnium-gatherum of horticultural wisdom and practical advice, Our Life in Gardens is at once literate, learned, sensible, and, often, sheer luscious poetry. There are delights to be sampled on every page. From a cultivated life, they have brought forth, once again, a cultivated book. — Philip Gambone

I also like to garden. I grow things, vegetables, flowers ... I particularly like orchids. I raise orchids. — Beau Bridges

My extravagance is my garden - it's the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure. — Ina Garten

I enjoy painting, cutting the lawn and working in the garden when I have time. That's therapy for me. I enjoy working with my hands. — Billy Williams

Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. — Marcelene Cox

Well, software doesn't quite work that way. Rather than construction, software is more like gardening - it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost. — Andrew Hunt

A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them. — Liberty Hyde Bailey

As for vegetables, I do not consider a plot of ground devoted to them worthy of the honorable name of garden. Vegetables are, of course, a part of gardening, but the least, the last, -for those who do not have to raise them, the most dishonorable part. — Harrison Gray Otis Dwight

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own. — Alice Walker

The language of gardening fuels the senses: talk with your hands, observe with your ears and listen with your eyes. — Costa Georgiadis

Gardening as far as Gardening is Art, or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a Garden. — Joshua Reynolds

A nuclear reactor is a proposed "solution" to "the energy problem." But like all big-technological "solutions," this one "solves" a single problem by causing many ...
A garden, on the other hand, is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is a part of the limitless pattern of good health and good sense. — Wendell Berry

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens
a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree
the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence
antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment. — Michael Pollan

What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky. — Victor Hugo

There aren't a lot of hobbies you can eat. Like, let's say you love to cook. That's a bad example. Let's say you love to travel, and everywhere you go, you try the food at the best local - My point is, I love gardening as a hobby. Right now in our garden, Portia and I are growing tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, beets, eggplant, — Ellen DeGeneres

At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous. — Mirabel Osler

Beyond its practical aspects, gardening - be it of the soil or soul - can lead us on a philosophical and spiritual exploration that is nothing less than a journey into the depths of our own sacredness and the sacredness of all beings. After all, there must be something more mystical beyond the garden gate, something that satisfies the soul's attraction to beauty, peace, solace, and celebration. — Christopher McDowell

Successful gardening is doing what has to be done when it has to be done the way it ought to be done whether you want to do it or not. — Jerry Baker

A good garden may have some weeds. — Thomas Fuller

A garden is the place millions of people go to touch the earth, to smell flowers - to use some of that fabled human brain power in the cause of better participating with natural processes in the place they call home. It serves as an art project, an organic produce market, a spiritual practice, a pharmacy. It offers ongoing lessons in ecology, biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology. Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time. It bestows on its practitioners a genuine sense of admiration for the plants, the soil, the sun, the water. — Jim Nollman

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners ... Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat ... Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters. — Colin Wilson

Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense. — Phyllis McGinley

Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time. — William Cowper

To garden is a solitary act. — Michelle Cliff

Emery was kneeling outside "gardening" when Ceony and Langston stepped through the illusion that masked the paper magician's house. He had positioned himself outside the curving garden of meticulously crafted paper flowers, and seemed to be replacing all the red, tulip-shaped flower heads with blue, lily-shaped ones. Fennel chewed on the discarded spells as Emery worked, crumpling them in his paper mouth and then spitting the balls into an overturned trash receptacle. — Charlie N. Holmberg

Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity. — John Evelyn

If you want to have a balanced garden, feed the soil and build the ecosystem. — Cindy Conner

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs. — Joseph Addison

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

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. — Gertrude Stein

Guess what?" she said to us. "Someone chopped down a tree in Mrs. Spencer's garden last night."

I stared at her incredulously for a moment. Not a much-loved family member, then, not a nuclear power plant. My eyes went to Florence's face, which was wet with tears. Was she really crying over Mr. Snuggles?

Unobtrusively, I slipped past Lottie and over to the coffee machine, put the biggest cup I could find under it, and pressed the cappuccino button. Twice.

"A tree? But why?" asked Mia with a perfectly judged mixture of curiosity and mild surprise.

"No one knows," said Lottie. "But Mrs. Spencer has already called in Scotland Yard. It was a very valuable tree."

I almost laughed out loud. Yes, sure. I bet they had a special gardening squad to investigate such cases. Scotland Front Yard. Good day, my name is Inspector Griffin and I'm looking into the murder of Mr. Snuggles. — Kerstin Gier

I need my friends, I need my house, I need my garden. — Miranda Richardson

I should like to enflame the whole world with my taste for gardening. There is no virtue that I would not attribute to the man who lives to project and execute gardens. — Michel, 14th Prince Of Ligne

I read, go for walks and I love to garden. My hands are such a mess. People think I should have movie star hands, but they're just gardening ones. Always slightly grubby and with a bit of dirt under the fingernails. — Amanda Donohoe

I suppose that for most people one of the darker joys of gardening is that once you've got started it's not at all hard to find someone who knows a little bit less than you. — Allen Lacy

One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds. — Dan Bennett

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven? — Alfred De Vigny

Gardening is like landscape painting to me. The garden is the canvas. Plants, containers and other garden features are the colors. I paint on the garden of canvas hoping to create a master piece with my colors. — Ama H. Vanniarachchy

Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden. — Doris Day

I think gardening is nearer to godliness than theology. True gardeners are both iconographers and theologians insofar as these activities are the fruit of prayer 'without ceasing.' Likewise, true gardeners never cease to garden, not even in their sleep, because gardening is not just something they do. It is how they live. — Vigen Guroian

Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed. — Lewis Gannett

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us. — Robert Smithson

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest. — Voltaire

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. — George Bernard Shaw

At the bottom of freshly dug holes, I bury my problems alongside the waxen seeds. — Kelseyleigh Reber

When I go into the garden, I forget everything. It's uncomplicated in my world of gardening. It's trial and error, really. If something doesn't work, it comes out, and you start all over again. — Emilia Fox

The cottage garden; most for use designed, Yet not of beauty destitute. — Charlotte Smith

I now derive physical and spiritual pleasure from gardening and there is tremendous satisfaction in knowing that I could survive almost anywhere if I had to. — Don Henley

Each of us is like seed, planted by the Good Gardener so we might grow into something majestic. — Seth Adam Smith

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. — Gertrude Jekyll

Beyond the harm to local wildlife, any chemicals we used in our garden might end up polluting our well, or run off the property. In a heavy rainstorm, this runoff may end up in nearby Beaver Creek, a tributary to the Brandywine Creek, which runs into the Delaware River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean. These kinds of direct connections with the outside world exist in every garden, which is why I think we should always aim, in our gardening practices, to do the least harm and the greatest good. — David L. Culp

Town-planning," Geddes once wrote, "is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is . . . to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish." These places, of course, are not really to be found, but have to be made. From his earliest designs for a botanical school garden and urban renewal work in Edinburgh to his latest building initiatives in Montpelier in southern France, Geddes pursued the creation of such places. He perceived himself as a gardener ordering the environment for the benefit of life. — Volker M. Welter

I think I may be a better person for having given serious time and thought and effort to gardening. — Martha Stewart

May I a small house and large garden have;
And a few friends,
And many books, both true. — Abraham Cowley

This garden is your life. Of course, there are the occasional weeds - but more than anything, this garden is filled with so much life! — Seth Adam Smith

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

After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katherine dug with hard chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her.
The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made. — Stephen M. Irwin

As I leave the garden
I take with me a renewed view,
And a quiet soul. — Jessica Coupe

I do
sincerely trust that the benediction that is always
awaiting me in my garden may by degrees be more
deserved, and that I may grow in grace, and
patience, and cheerfulness, just like the happy
flowers I so much love. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Gardening is the best therapy in the world. — C. Z. Guest

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

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society. — Andrew Weil

There's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth. — George Eliot

I know that if odour were visible, as colour is, I'd see the summer garden in rainbow clouds. — Robert Bridges

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession. — Phyllis McGinley