Quotes for Gardeners
Diversity, Multiplicity, Chaos
Abandon the urge to simplify
everything, to look for formulas and easy answers,
and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of
life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are
inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.
- M. Scott Peck
The little things? The
little moments? They aren't little.
- John Zabat-Zinn
We learn from our gardens to deal
with the most
urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
- Wendell Berry
A garden is like the self. It
has so many layers and
winding paths, real or imagined, that it can never
be known, completely, every by the most
intimate of friends.
- Anne Raver, Deep in the Green, 1995
Show me a person without prejudice of
any kind on any subject and
I'll show you someone who may be admirably virtuous but is surely
no gardener. Prejudice against people is reprehensible, but a healthy
set of prejudices is a gardener's best friend. Gardening is complicated,
and prejudice simplifies it enormously.
- Allen Lacy, Home Ground, 1984
I see the world in very fluid,
contradictory, emerging,
interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just
don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.
- Jerry Brown
It isn't that I don't like sweet
disorder,
but it has to be judiciously arranged.
- Vita Sackville West
A true
noun, an isolated thing, does not exit in nature. Things are
only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions,
cross sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure
verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun
and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things.
- Ernest Fenollosa
Because a garden mean constantly
making choices,
it offers almost limitless possibilities for surprise and satisfaction.
- Jane Garmey, The Writer in the Garden
The simplicities of natural laws
arise through the complexities
of the language we use for their expression.
- Eugene Wigner
Existence consist in the interplay of
a plurality of elements
whose true nature is indescribable and whose source is
unknown. Combinations of these elements instantaneously
flash into existence and instantaneously disappear, to be
succeeded by new combinations of elements
appearing in a strict causality.
- Earle Ernst, The Kabuki Theatre
To make progress in understanding all
this, we probably
need to begin with simplified (oversimplified?) models and
ignore the critics' tirade that the real world is more complex.
The real world is always more complex, which
has the advantage that we shan't run out of work.
- John Ball, 1984, Memes as Replicators, Ethology and
Sociobiology, Vol. 5
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are
not cones,
coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth,
nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
- Benoit Mandelbrot
Gardening is about being grounded,
rooted to the here and now
with the need to tidy up. It is the difference between managing
life and entering into life, reminding us that gardening need not
be the fraught, perfectionistic, slightly paranoid struggle that it
becomes for some. Truth is, our love of plants is bound up with
a taste for human error, nature's excesses, and sheer
unadulterated indulgence.
- Terry Hershey, Soul Gardening, p. 104
Simplicity - Quotes for Gardeners
Simple pleasures are the last refuge
of the complex.
- Oscar Wilde
How deeply seated in the human heart is the
liking for gardens and gardening.
- Alexander Smith
An agricultural adage says the tiny
animals that live below the
surface of a healthy pasture weigh more than the cows grazing
above it. In a catalogue selling composting equipment I read
that two handfuls of healthy soil contain more living organisms
than there are people on the earth. What these beings are and
what they can be doing is difficult to even begin to comprehend,
but it helps to realize that even thought they are many,
they work as one.
- Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life, 1998
Nature goes her own way and all that to us seems
an exception is really according to order.
- Goethe
Making simple matters complex or complex matters simple are both bad gardening techniques.
Simplifying our
relations to things sometimes allows us to live
more complex intellectual and emotional
lives.
Repetition and diversification are Nature's formulas.
Simplifying and simplicity are never simple matters.
The empty garden is already full.
The happiest gardeners have simply learned how to relax.
The simplest garden is never simple.
It takes four seasons to know one year.
Complexity is closer to the Truth.
Diversity, multiplicity, relations,
combinations, mixtures, complexity -
rarely just one process or one thing.
Location, location, location ... is also true for plants.
Never just One: fruit, a hoe, the moving Sun.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions
Plurality should not be assumed
without necessity.
- William of Ockham
The motto of science is not just Pauca
but rather
Plurima ex paucissimis - the most out of the least.
- M. Bunge, The Myth of Simplicity, 1963
The human mind can appreciate the One
only by seeing it first in the Many.
- Joseph Wood Krutch
I first read classical and
modern Western and Eastern philosophers when I was fifteen,
and have since considered myself a person with a humanistic, pragmatic, secular,
and
philosophical outlook on most matters. I have been content to use reasoning
and science
to help me solve most of my problems. Like most people, I make room for
mystical,
mythical, poetic, and symbolic viewpoints when dealing with many artistic,
psychological and values issues.
- Mike Garofalo
What is important is that complex
systems, richly cross-connected
internally, have complex behaviours, and that these behaviours can be
goal-seeking in complex patterns.
- W. Ross Ashby
Unity is plural and, at a
minimum, is two.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
For the first half of geological time
our ancestors were bacteria.
Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of
our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
- Richard Dawkins
O Marvelous! what new
configuration will come next?
I am bewildered with multiplicity.
- William Carlos Williams, At Dawn, 1914
Life is a banquet, and most fools are starving to death.
Orlog
The Norns' Chant
In the midst of darkness, light;
In the midst of death, life;
In the midst of chaos, order.
In the midst of order, chaos;
In the midst of life, death;
In the midst of light, darkness.
Thus has it ever been,
Thus is it now, and
Thus shall it always be.
- Ancient
Nordic Spirituality
Gardening and Spirituality
A short essay by Mike Garofalo
Use what talent you possess.
The woods would be very
silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
- Henry Van Dyke
Each portion of matter may be
conceived of as a garden full of plants,
and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member
of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.
- Leibniz
Every explicit duality is an implicit
unity.
- Alan Watts
Everything is complex
and everything is simple. The rose has
no why attached to it, it blooms because it blooms, how no
thought of itself, or desire to be seen. What could be more
complicated than a rose for someone who wants to understand
it? What could be simpler for someone who wants nothing?
The complexity of thinking, the simplicity of beholding.
- Andre Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues,
p. 150
Part of the problem today is that we
have a surplus
of simple answers and a shortage of simple problems.
- Syracuse Herald
If you're anxious for to shine in the
high aesthetic line
As a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms
And plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases
Of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter
Of a
transcendental
kind.
- W.S. Gilbert, Bunthorne's Song from Patience
To understand the whole it is
necessary to understand the parts.
To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole.
Such is the circle of understanding.
- Ken Wilber, Eye of Spirit
Chaos is a name for any order that
produces confusion in our minds.
- George Santayana
Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough,
but not baked in the same oven.
- Yiddish Proverb
We struggle with the complexities
and avoid the simplicities.
- Norman Vincent Peale
May you have warm words on a cold
evening,
A full moon on a dark night,
And the road downhill all the way to your door.
- Irish Saying
Exclusiveness in a garden is a
mistake as great as it is in society.
- Alfred Austin
We live in a rainbow of chaos.
- Paul Cezanne
In the beginner's mind there are many
possibilities;
in the expert's there are few.
- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Diversity ... is not polite
accommodation. Instead, diversity
is, in action, the sometimes painful awareness that other
people, other races, other voices, other habits of mind, have
as much integrity of being, as much claim on the world as
you do. And I urge you, amid all the differences present to
the eye and mind, to reach out to create the bond that will
protect us all. We are meant to be here together.
- William Chase
When two texts, or two assertions,
perhaps two ideas,
are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather
than cancel one by the other; regard them as two
different facets, or two successive stages, of the
same reality, a reality convincingly human
just because it is complex.
- Marguerite Yourcenar
To study the self is to forget the
self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.
- Zen Master Dogen
The more we understand individual things,
the more we understand God.
- Benedict De Spinoza
God is in the details.
- Mies Van Der Rohe
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Details are all there are.
- Maezumi Roshi
We think in generalities, but we live in
details.
- W.H. Auden
If you take care of the little things, the
big things take care of themselves.
- R. Reese
We work with the stuff of the soul by
means of the things of life.
- Thomas Moore
Pay attention to minute particulars. Take
care of the little ones.
Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.
- William Blake
The object of our lives is to look at,
listen to, touch, taste things.
Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, -
there is no Deity.
- R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p.
144.
When we look for things there is
nothing but mind,
and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
- Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, p 131
"Do things noncoercively (wuwei),
Be non-interfering in going about your business (wushi),
And savor the flavor of the unadulterated in what you eat.
Treat the small as great
and the few as many.
Requite enmity with character (de).
Take account of the difficult while it is still easy,
And deal with the large while it is still tiny.
The most difficult things in the world originate with the easy,
And the largest issues originate with the tiny.
Thus, it is because the sages never try to do great things
That they are indeed able to be great.
One who makes promises lightly is sure to have little credibility;
One who finds everything easy is certain to have lots of difficulties.
Thus, it is because even the sages pay careful attention to such things
That they are always free of difficulties.
Chapter 63, Daodejing
Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall
Daodejing "Making This Life Significant": A Philosophical Translation,
(2003), p. 175.
Classics: Ancient Wisdom for Making This Life Significant
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a
single premise: that the individual
is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts
prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics
prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a
place to compete for). ... The land ethic simply enlarges the
boundaries
of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals...
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Statistics are like a bikini.
What they reveal is suggestive,
but what they conceal is vital.
- Aaron Levenstein
Step out onto the Planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.
Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.
How many can you find?
- Lew Welch
Everything is both simpler than we can
imagine,
and more complicated that we can conceive.
- Goethe
The truth is rarely pure
and never simple.
- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
For the beginning is assuredly
the end -- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.
- William Carlos Williams, Patterson, 1946, Book I, p.3
Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and
whole, and has
remained complex and whole ever since—not because of a mysterious
élan vital, but thanks to the simple, profound transformation of dead
molecules into an organization by which each molecule's formation is
catalyzed by some other molecule in the organization. The secret of life,
the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of
Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of collective catalytic
closure. So, in another sense, life—complex, whole, emergent—is
simple after all, a natural outgrowth of the world in which we live.
- Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, p. 47
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
- Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity
and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions
Quips and Observations of a Gardener
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Clichés for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Clichés, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas,
Contributions, and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Complexity - Quotes for Gardeners.
Version 4.7
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong