Desire, Sex, Love, Romance

Delight, Dreams


Quotes for Those that Love
Gardens, Gardening and the Green Way

 

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo


 

 

 

 

Nevertheless, it means much to have loved,
To have been happy, to have laid my hand on
The living Garden, even for one day.
-  Jorge Luis Borges, Adam Cast Forth

 

 

 

 


If a man could have just half of his wishes, he would double his troubles.
-  Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that ...  
I might be master at last of a  small house and a large garden, with very 
moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder 
of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature.
-   Abraham Cowley, circa 1655

 

 

 

 

 

 

flow2.gif (27433 bytes)

 

 

 

 

 

 

To love someone who does not love you, 
is like shaking a tree to make the dew drops fall.
-  Proverb from the Congo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whoever has not learned to let Nature have her way
is not fit for a gardener, or, for that matter, for a contented soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disturbed is the condition of my pool.
The mouth of my lover is a rosebud.
Her breast is a perfume.
Her arm is a ............ bough
Which offers a delusive seat.
Her forehead is a snare of meryu-wood.
-   Eqyptian Love Poetry, circa 1500.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A garden makes all our senses swim with pleasure.
-   William Lawson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So if you'll permit, a little advice from two who have felt passion's sting:
if you invite art into the garden, be prepared for a lesson on love.  It
seems only right that we learn love's lessons here; relationship is so
evident in a garden.  Above the hum of ecosystems, life webs and
companion plantings, the gods whisper: true love, whether romantic
or platonic, brotherly, sisterly, for friend or humanity, transcends the
physical.  It seeks a higher image of the human being.  It is not a
feeling.  It is an infinite, unifying force that speaks of the unity of life
and the interconnectedness of all things.  So go ahead, invite art into
the garden, but go thoughtfully, prayerfully even, and stay firmly
rooted in the divine, for you are treading on passionate ground.

Spring Gillard

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flowers - Quotes for Gardeners


 

 

 

 

 

God Almightie first Planted a Garden.    And indeed it is the Purest of Humane pleasures.
It is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirits of Man; Without which, Buildings
and Palaces are but Grosse Handy-works.
-   Frances Bacon 1598 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O Lord,
grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight until three o'clock in the morning,
but, you see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak in; grant that at the same time it would not rain on
campion, alyssum, heliaanthemum, lavender, and the others which you in your infinite wisdom know are drought
loving plants - I will write their names on a paper if you like - and grant that the sun may shine the whole day
long,  but not everywhere (not for instance, on spiraea, or on gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron), and not
to much; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plant-lice and snails, no mildew,
and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano may fall from heaven. 
Amen.
-  Karel Capek, The Gardener's Year, 1929

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

... in gardens, beauty is a by-product.
The main business is sex and death ...
-   Sam Llewelyn, The Sea Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People say "I want peace."  If you remove I (ego), and your
want (desire), you are left with peace.
-   Satya Sai Baba

 

 

 

 

 

 

Months - Poems, Quotes, Links, Lore and Garden Chores

 

 

 

 

 

 

Any book about gardens, written for the pleasure of writing, must
have its sources in dreams.  The visions of gardens beautiful and
retired hover before the imagination, and no real garden, however
humble, but is invested in celestial light of cherished hopes of what
it may become in fragrant flowers or what it might have been
had fortune been kind.
-   Lena May McCauley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If I had a flower for every time you made me smile,
I'd be walking in an endless garden.
-   Author Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love
and respond to it as they do to nothing else.
-   Celia Thaxter

 

 

 


From moment to moment
Sliding in the silences
The creativity of being
Is love
-  Maggie, UK, For Krishnamurti

 

 

 

 

Some people who have become infatuated with the Arisaema clan
may find the plants sinister and malevolent, mysterious or erotic. 
I think they are cute - weird but amiable.  I love the Arisaemas,
and my passion intensifies as I get older and learn more about them. 
If loving such a plant is a sign of arrested development, so be it. 
Sex, after all, like gardening is one of the few interests that last a lifetime.
-   Ken Druse, Desire Under the Jacks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Searching for plants
I love the green around us
the feeling of new life
surrounding us as we hug
between the rows
Lee Stapp

 

 

 

 

 

 

Timing, degree and conviction are the three wise men in this life.
-   R.I. Fitzhenry

 

 

 

 

Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard. 
-   Standing Bear

 

 

 

 

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like
a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
-  Oscar Wilde

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw

 

 

 

 

 

 

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.
-   Anonymous

 

 

 

 

 

 

The principle of agriculture is the principle of ordered sexual union.
-   John Jacob Bachofen, 1861

 

 

 

 

 

 

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have
their own reality.  They are prevented from seeing one another and
they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways
of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent
of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing
of the wind, and the gleam of the stars - all the beauties of creation.

-  Victor Hugo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Believe in yourself, your neighbors, your work,
your ultimate attainment of more complete happiness. 
It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the
Spring, who reaps a harvest in Autumn.
-   B. C. Forbes

 

 

 

 

 

What do we look for as reward? 
Some little sounds, and scents, and scenes. 
A small hand darting strawberry-ward. 
A woman's aprons full of greens.

The sense that we have brought to birth. 
Out of the cold and heavy soil, 
The blessed fruits and flowers of earth. 
Is large reward for our toil.

-   Ruth Pitter, The Diehards, 1941

 

 

 

 

How deeply seated in the human heart
is the liking for gardens and gardening.
-   Alexander Smith

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An addiction to gardening is not all bad when
you consider all the other choices in life.
-   Cora Lea Bell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To change your life:
Start immediately;
Do it flamboyantly;
No exceptions.

-   William James

 

 

 

 

 

 

A flower's fragrance declares to all the world that it is fertile,
available, and desirable, its sex organs oozing with nectar.  
Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigor, life-force,
all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth. 
We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages,
we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire.
-   Diane Ackerman,  A Natural History of the Senses, 1990, p. 13

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this world there are only two tragedies:  One is not getting what one wants,
and the other is getting it.
- Oscar Wilde

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A research project in Australia, entitled "The Congruent Garden: an
Investigation into the Role of the Domestic Garden in Satisfying
Fundamental Human Needs," interviewed  gardeners on the values of
gardening in their everyday lives.  The researcher, Mike Steven,
established that gardens have the potential to satisfy nine basic human
needs (subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation,
leisure, creation, identity, freedom) across four  existential states
(being, having, doing and interacting.)
-   Mike Steven, Lecturer in Landscape Studies,
    University of Westen Sydney, Australia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It used to be thought that our love of plants was an impractical
but pure passion.  But now, in the age of environmental crisis,
we're discovering that gardening is essential to human life.
-   Jacqueline Heriteau

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. 
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.
- Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian, 1890

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take it from us, 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 and R. J. Yeatman, Garden Rubbish, 1936

 

 

 

 

 

 

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
-   Sir Walter Raleigh, The Nymph's Reply to the Shepard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are no green thumbs or black thumbs.  There are only gardeners and
non-gardeners.  Gardeners are the one who ruin after ruin get on with the
high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and
tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises.  It sounds very well to
garden a "natural way."  You may see the natural way in any desert,
any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell.  Defiance, on the other
hand, is what makes gardeners.
-  Henry Mitchell

 

 

 

 

 

 

Haiku and Zen Poetry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some people like to make a little garden out of life!
-  Unknown Author

 

 

 

 

 

 

El corazon de la auyama solo lo conoce el cuchillo.
The heart --inside-- of a pumpkin or

edible squash is only known by the knife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A life with love must have some thorns,
but a life with no love will have no roses.
-   Author Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nature: The Unseen Intelligence which loved us into being,
and is disposing of us by the same token.
-   Elbert Hubbard

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.
Swedish Proverb

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is curious, pathetic almost, how deeply seated in the human heart
is the liking for gardens and gardening.
-   Alexander Smith

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are always some of us, not a few, in every generation, who go over
wholly to the green flag.  It is such a passionless fealty, so reticent a love, that
neither do trumpets sound for it nor quarrels arise from it.  Only, you will find
that those who have pledged allegiance are happy about it in quiet.
-   Donald C. Peattie, Flowering Earth, 1939

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emotion always has its roots in the unconscious and manifests itself in the body.
-   Irene Claremont de Castillejo

 

 

 

 

 

 

What you do not like done to yourself, do not do unto others.
-  Confucius, 500 BC

 

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
-  Christian Gospels Proverb, 100 AD

 

Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
-  Spinoza, 1670 AD

 

Zen Buddhist Ethical Precepts

 

 

 

 

 

A life without love is like a year without summer.
-   Swedish Proverb

 

 

 

A flower touches everyone's heart. 
-   Georgia O'Keefe

 

 

 

One of the most delightful things about a garden
is the anticipation it provides.
-   W. E. Johns

 

 

 

The garden is so ferociously sexy at night, 
it's almost lurid. 
-   Anne Raver

 

 

 

The only limit to your garden is at the boundaries of your imagination.
-  Thomas D. Church

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quotes for Gardeners

A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clichés, Adages

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Over 6MB of Text

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then Heaven, the Father almighty, comes down in fruitful showers
into the lap of his joyous spouse, and his might, with her
mighty frame comingling, nurtures all growths.
-   Virgil, Georgics, circa 90 B.C.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies.
-  Gertrude Jekyll

 

 

 

 

 

 

Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone:
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.

For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
On a bed of daffodil sky.
-  Lord Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps.
- Amos Bronson Alcott

 

 

 

 

 

Simplicity - Quotes for Gardeners

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The heart's affections are divided like the branches of the cedar tree; if the tree loses one
strong branch; it will suffer but it does not die; it will pour all its vitality into the next
branch so that it will grow and fill the empty place.
-   Khalil Gibran

 

 

 

 

 

Much happiness is lost in the pursuit of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Believe in yourself, your neighbors, your work, your ultimate attainment of more
complete happiness. It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the
Spring, who reaps a harvest in Autumn.
-  B. C. Forbes

 

 

 

 

 

If you have the desire, you are halfway there.
-  E. Crique

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have
something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them
in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy; at
any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.
-  Jamaica Kincaid, My Favorite Plant

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

I believe if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave,
from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.
-   Benito Perez Galdos

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank God for unanswered prayers.
- Garth Brooks

 

 

 

 

 

 

To love what you do and feel that it matters--how could anything be more fun?
-   Katherine Graham

 

 

 

Flowers are love's truest language. 
-   Park Benjamin

 

 

 

Be yourself.  Especially do not feign affection.  Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass."
-  Author Unknown, Desiderata

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your words are my food, your breath my wine.
You are everything to me.
-   Sarah Bernhardt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If it's rare, we want it.  If it's tiny and impossible to grow,
we've got to have it.  It it's brown, looks dead,
and has black flowers we'll kill for it.
-  Ken Druse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I knew in my heart that I wanted to know the garden intimately, to know
all the flowers in each season, to be there from spring through autumn,
digging, pruning, planting, feeding, rejoicing.  In short, I had fallen in love.
-  Elizabeth Murray

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense,
and everyday experience.  Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around ...  
Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been
recognized as a valuable element in healing.
-   Larry Dossey

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor's.
- Mary Cantwell

 

 

By the time you find greener pastures, 
you can't climb over the fence.

 

 

 

When the world wearies, and society ceases to satisfy,
there is always the garden.
-  Author Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plant on a whim.  Lay the footpath where your heart says it should be.
Change things because you feel like it.  Garden for the love of it.  
-   Lindley Karstens

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trees - Quotes for Gardeners

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We'll dive into the earth together.   And if one day a wild flower
finds water and springs up from that piece of earth, its stem will

have two blooms for sure: one will be you, the other me.
-  Nazim Hikmet, Letter From My Wife

 

 

 

Memories are forget-me-nots gathered along life's way, 
pressed close to the human heart into a perennial bouquet. 
-   Clara Smith Reber

 

 

 

We had lost all ordinary sense of time and place.  Those flowers that came new
to Lawrence, the fireflies at night and the glow-worms, the first beech leaves
spreading on the trees like a delicate veil overhead, and our feet buried in last
year's brown beech leaves, these were our time and our events.
When Lawrence first found a gentian, a big single blue one, I remember feeling
as if he had a strange communion with it, as if the gentian yielded up its blueness,
its very essence, to him.  Everything he met had the newness of a creation
just that moment come into being.
-  Frieda Lawrence writing about her 1912 honeymoon with D. H. Lawrence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Priapus, lively and naughty, aroused and outlandish, is the Duende de el Jardin.
Mother Nature is always pregnant.
Fruits, nuts, grains ... sex and food.    Flowers  ... sex and beauty.   
If it were not for the sex life of plants, we would have no sex life of our own.


-  Michael P. Garofalo,  Pulling Onions

 

 

 

 

 

So rests the sky against the earth.  The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest.
As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare
ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning.  I feel
an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed.  A
longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned
by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the
wind, the embrace of water and light.  Content?   No, no, no -- but refreshed,
rested -- while waiting.
-   Dag Hammarskjold

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One can get lost in their garden and the rest of the world ceases
to exist, if only for a while.  Anger dissipates with every shovel of
dirt moved, pleasure is found in the simplest forms, excitement
is felt as each tiny plant matures and then triumph with the harvest
of the first tomato of the season. The love of gardening never
goes away.  Even if someone is unable to garden themselves,

they enjoy the gardens of others.
Renee Hogan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a
perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing
to it … you and you alone make me feel that I am alive.
Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have
seen thee and thou art enough.

-   George Moore

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grow along with me,
the best is yet to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gardening is a cooperative affair.   I am a
part of a neighborhood in which plants, dirt,
rocks and a human family participate collectively
in a love affair with place.
-   Jim Nollman, Why We GardenThe Sentient Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have a garden of my own,
Shining with flowers of every hue;
I loved it dearly while alone,
But I shall love it more with your:
And there the golden bees shall come,
In summer time at the break of morn,
And wake us with their busy hum
Around the Siha's fragrant thorn.
-   Thomas Moore, The Casket, 1835

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law,
and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for
the brief hour of its duration.
-  D. H. Lawrence

 

 

 

 

 

 

We grow great by dreams.   All big men are dreamers.  They see things in the
soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening.  Some of
us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them
through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes

always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.
-   Woodrow Wilson

 

 

 

 

 

 

I didn't know what narcissism was
until I beheld my own naricssus.
-   Charles Kuralt

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are told that in Persia the tulip, whose blossom in its native
country is scarlet, while the centre of its glowing cup is black,
is used to express warm affection; and, when sent by a lover,
will convey to the object of his attachment the idea that like
this flower, his face is warm and his heart is consumed as a coal.
-   Anne Pratt, The Field, the Garden and the Woodland, 1838

 

 

 

 

 

 

Danger and delight grow on one stalk.
-   English Proverb

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rose speaks of love silently,
in a language known only to the heart.
-   Author Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pleasure of a garden are everyday renewed.  A garden is the
only complete delight the world affords, even complying with our
various and mutable minds.
-   Author Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve
in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden
with her than inside it without her.
-  Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

 

 

                        This morning, in the Garden of Delight, love came gently on us.
                        Its sweet melody whispered in the trees, shivering the leaves.
                        Its fragrance wafted through the tapestry of flowers
                        And flicked the ears of the massive hounds,
                        While the white unicorn stepped daintily under fruit trees.
                                                            -   Gillian Savage, Garden of Delight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets,
and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything.   Live and let
live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve
which flows on, pointless.
-   D.H. Lawrence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't
exist in a lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower
and set seed.  Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. 
No wonder Americans like them so much.
-   Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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More Quotes

for

Gardeners



Trees

 

Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul

Flowers

Weeds and Weeding

Simplicity and the Simple Life


Pulling Onions
Quips and Observations by Michael P. Garofalo

The Essence of Gardening

Working in the Garden

Garden Digest Links

 

Haiku Poetry  -  Links and References

Clichés for Gardeners and Farmers


The History of Gardening Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century


Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo

Seeing and Vision

Beauty in the Garden


Seasons and Time

Zen Poetry

Comments about this Web Site

Jokes, Riddles and Humor

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spirit of Gardening


 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

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

 

Desire - Quotes for Gardeners.  Version 4.7.

 

 

 

The Spirit of Gardening

Quotes for Gardeners

Haiku and Short Poems

The History of Gardening Timeline

Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong

Months

Zen Poetry

Fitness and Well Being

Green Way Research

Trees