Quotes & Sayings About Gardening

Gardening is an active participation in The deepest mysteries of the universe. — Thomas Berry

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

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

Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment. — Dogen

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

Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy. — Eleanor Perenyi

I think doing something creative is the most important thing to me, and I think it's probably just good for the soul for anyone, whatever it is. You don't have to be a film director - you can do gardening or something - but I think everyone needs to create something. — Ricky Gervais

A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment. — Terry Pratchett

Gardening is the instrument of grace. — May Sarton

It's difficult for people to come to the understanding that only a small minority of the people ever really get the word about life, about living abundantly and successfully. Success in the important departments of life seldom comes naturally, no more naturally than success at anything-a musical instrument, sports, fly-fishing, tennis, golf, business, marriage, parenthood, landscape gardening. But somehow people wait passively for success to come to them, living as other people are living in the unspoken, tacit assumption that other people know how to live successfully. — Earl Nightingale

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 don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one. — Luis Barragan

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

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark. — Olivia Sudjic

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

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

I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia. — Barbra Streisand

I park my bike in her driveway and ring her doorbell. I clear my throat so I don't choke on my words. Mierda, what am I gonna say to her? And why am I feeling all insecure, like I need to impress her because she'll judge me?
Nobody answers. I ring again.
Where's a servant or butler to answer the door when you need one? Just as I'm about to give up and slap myself with a big dose of what-the-fuck-do-I-think-I'm-doing, the door opens. Standing before me is an older version of Brittany. Obviously her mom. When she takes one look at me, her disappointing sneer is obvious.
"Can I help you?" she asks with an attitude. I sense either she expects me to be part of the gardening crew or someone going door-to-door harassing people. "We have a 'no soliciting policy' in this neighborhood."
"I'm, uh, not here to solicit anythin'. My name's Alex. I just wanted to know if Brittany was, uh, at home?" Oh, great. Now I'm mumbling uh's every two seconds. — Simone Elkeles

Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible. — Anne Wareham

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

Life, weddings, relationships, road trips, gardening, making out, haircuts: few of the fun things in life always go as expected. — Ariel Meadow Stallings

Gardening is the greatest tonic and therapy a human being can have. Even if you have only a tiny piece of earth, you can create something beautiful, which we all have a great need for. If we begin by respecting plants, it's inevitable we'll respect people. — Audrey Hepburn

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. — May Sarton

You know I know next to zip about gardening, right?
It's easy. You buy the pretty pots from the nursery, you stick them in the ground. If they die, you buy more. If not, you brag like there's no tomorrow. — Sarah Mayberry

The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin. — Jan Struther

In the rare moments I permitted any stillness, I noted a small fluttering at the pit of my belly, a barely perceptible disturbance. The faint whisper of a word would sound in my head: writing. At first I could not say whether it was heartburn or inspiration. The more I listened, the louder the message became: I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself. The gods, we are taught, created humankind in their own image. Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art, or music or through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening, or the art of social discourse. The point is to honor the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits. When I did not write, I suffocated in silence. — Gabor Mate

But the truth is, I want to be some woman's work boots, not her high heels."
"Work boots?" What was sexy about that? And did women have work boots?
"Yeah. You know, the boots she pulls out when she wants to get down and dirty, hiking or gardening or boating or painting the kitchen. The ones she relies on and trusts and lives her life hard and good and on her terms in. Her favorites. — Erin McCarthy

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

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

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

Ideas come at any moment
except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.
My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done. — Chuck Palahniuk

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil. — Anne Lamott

A weed is but an unloved flower. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

one of the healthy vegetable with different color, it come in by a lot of fun and beautiful fall season. Gardening, seasons, life, and what people doing with pumpkin. Family can have a lot of fun and enjoy their time (and at the same time learn a lot of new things) — Jill Esbaum

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

Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama. — J.M. Roberts

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

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

There is something soothing about working in the yard. Planting seeds and seeing them poke green out of the dirt. And it gets you out of the house with out going too far. — Michael Lee West

The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize the well-being of the soil-air-water biosphere, the creatures which inhabit it, and the human beings who depend upon it. — Eliot Coleman

We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. Tell a counselor how angry you are. Share it with friends and family. Scream into a pillow. Find ways to get it out without hurting yourself or someone else. Try walking, swimming, gardening - any type of exercise helps you externalize your anger. Do not bottle up anger inside. Instead, explore it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone

It must have been
the eighth day.

A day the scribes and Pharisees conveniently
left out.

Adam was either inspecting goats
or naming the birds

when something pinched
my side.

I had to stop pruning the tree of knowledge
to catch my breath.

God had taken a long weekend.

At first I thought the solitude of gardening
was going to my head.

Was it loneliness?
An omen? A vision?

For a moment I thought I would
ascend.

Then I realized it was just a rib
missing.

How you found your way in
along the banks of the third river

I will never know
but I still shiver to recall

how perfectly your fingers
fell into place

along the ridges
of my ribcage.

Go ahead, Love,
take every last bone.

Make of me
what you will. — Nancy Boutilier

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

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

There is some risk to increase birth defects if you do a lot of outdoor gardening when you are pregnant. That can increase rates of toxoplasmosis. — Emily Oster

Gardening is a long road, with many detours and way stations, and here we all are at one point or another. It's not a question of superior or inferior taste, merely a question of which detour we are on at the moment. Getting there (as they say) is not important; the wandering about in the wilderness or in the olive groves or in the bayous is the whole point. — Henry Mitchell

I like muddling things up; and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening. — Vita Sackville-West

I feel so fortunate to get paid to be an actor. I pinch myself. I get it from writing, I get it from baking, gardening ... I sort of open myself to the creative flow, which is hard to do, by the way. — Lauren Bowles

Dr. Watson's summary list of Sherlock Holmes's strengths and weaknesses:
1. Knowledge of Literature: Nil.
2. Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.
3. Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.
4. Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.
5. Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.
7. Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.
8. Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic.
9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law. — Arthur Conan Doyle

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

It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn. — B.C. Forbes

I just planted the family vegetables yesterday. You name it, I grow it. — Steve Zahn

Writer's block is a myth. I never see the gardeners suffering from gardening block. — Emo Philips

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

No one plants rosebushes for the thorns. — Marty Rubin

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

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

In real life, shouldn't a wedding be an awesome party you throw with your great pal, in the presence of a bunch of your other friends? A great day, for sure, but not the beginning and certainly not the end of your friendship with a person you can't wait to talk about gardening with the for the next forty years. — Mindy Kaling

I loved to get all dusty and ride horses and plant potatoes and cotton. — Dorothy Malone

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

She wrote her stories, and they were read and enjoyed - or so Lenore claimed - by many. Josephine enjoyed quiet society and music and books and gardening. — Elizabeth Hunter

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 secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love. — Luther Burbank

Use plants to bring life. — Douglas Wilson

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

You should bring something into the world that wasn't in the world before. It doesn't matter what that is. It doesn't matter if it's a table or a film or gardening - everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say, I did that. — Ricky Gervais

Miss Marple always sees everything. Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account. — Agatha Christie

Exercise your creative muscles all the time, either through classes or through other artistic avenues like painting or dancing or even gardening, staying active and being creative so that when opportunities do come up, you are in a position to take advantage of them. — Tom Irwin

To-day I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;
The smoke's smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.
It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
- A poem called DIGGING. — Edward Thomas

Well," he said, "I think we've found our way in. We just wait until they're duking it out, but trust me, these Humans First types don't have a lot of staying power or they'd have been at the gym with me before. I doubt Grandma Kent there is going to do a lot of damage." He pointed at a gray-haired, hunched lady in a shawl, carrying what looked liked a gardening tool. "It's like Plants Versus Zombies, and I'm not rooting for the zombies, weirdly enough. — Rachel Caine

There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat. — Vita Sackville-West

In fishing, golf and gardening, if you don't have a healthy tolerance for your own ineptitude, then it isn't for you. — William Bernard Ziff Jr.

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

March isn't the only thing that's in like a lion and out like a lamb. — Mae West

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

Where have all the flowers of old Singapore gone? Gone, one would imagine, with the old folks and homes — Thien

Of all human activities, apart from the procreation of children, gardening is the most optimistic and hopeful. The gardener is by definition one who plans for and believes and trusts in a future, whether in the short or the longer term. — Susan Hill

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined. — P. J. O'Rourke

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

Georgian England, to see those wonderful houses being built. And the clothes were interesting too, although I wouldn't want to wear a wig. It's also the most beautiful period of English landscape gardening. They had famous gardeners like Capability Brown. — Alan Titchmarsh

There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown. — Alice B. Toklas

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening. — Ken Thompson

The non-hybrids/heirlooms I grew equaled or out-yielded the hybrids in general, with far superior flavors and variety. — Craig Lehoullier

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 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

It's a Caster lock, not something on your locker door." Link huffed as he worked the gardening shears into the crack. "You're not from around here. Isn't a door in this whole county that can't be opened with a set of pliers or a sharp toothbrush. — Kami Garcia

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

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that. — Edna Ferber

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. — May Sarton

At the time I thought the winner in an argument was the person who put forward the most logical support for his position. Of course, this isn't true. Human history, from gardening disputes to genocide, is full of examples of people with the most decent, well-argued stance ending up with their face in the mud in front of a naked display of power. — Mark Barrowcliffe

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. — Michael Pollan

At Monticello he planned to return to farming and gardening with passionate zeal. — Jon Meacham

Living in New York after 14 years, I'm such an outdoors kind of person. I love gardening and building things. I like restoring old furniture. — Paige Butcher