Earth
Soil, Roots, Dirt, Place,
Digging, Ground, Stones, Rocks

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

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Quotes ... Links ... References

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ...
Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.
- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance,
the wise grows it under his feet.
- James Oppenheim

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.... if I wanted to have a happy garden, I must ally myself with my soil; study and help
it to the utmost, untiringly. .... Always, the soil must come first.
- Marion Cran, If I Where Beginning Again

The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those
intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view...
The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the
natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use
of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem
to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural.
- Adam Nicolson

Let me arise and open the gate,
to breathe the wild warm air of the heath,
And to let in Love, and to let out Hate,
And anger at living and scorn of Fate,
To let in Life, and to let out Death.
- Violet Fane

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
- Tennessee Williams

On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it.
- Jules Renard

The poetry of the earth is never dead.
- John Keats

I look back with gladness to the day when I found the path to
the land of heart's desire, and thank Fate ceaselessly with a
loud voice that she did not permit town to sap all the years
away while the heart was turning to wind-voices and
flower-faces and the hands of kindly earth.
- Mrs. George Cran, The Garden of Ignorance, 1913)

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of
our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is
the immersion of the hands in the earth, that
ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissing
the tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.
- Margaret Attwood

I refuse to have an emotional attachment to a piece of ground.
At one end of the scale it's called patriotism, at the other end
of the scale it's called gardening.
- Bob Shaw

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Mud is the most poetical thing in the world.
- R. H. Blyth

The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.
- Rabindranath Tagore

"Rocks pray to," said Grandad. "Pebbles and boulders
and old weathered hills. They are still and silent, and
those are two important ways to pray."
- Douglas Wood, Grandad's Prayers of the Earth.

Earth, thou great footstool of our God, who reigns on high;
thou fruitful source of all our raiment, life, and food;
our house, our parent, and our nurse.
- Isaac Watts

So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat,
and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
- Genesis 8:22

This planet is not terra firma.
It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for.
It's lonely.
It's small.
It's isolated, and there is no resupply.
And we are mistreating it.
- Scott Carpenter, astronaut

Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.
- Biblical proverb

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet
and the winds long to play with your hair.
- Kahlil Gibran

The earth laughs at him who calls a place his own.
- Hindustani Saying

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

I Welcome Your Comments and Suggestions

To dig in one's own earth, with one's own spade,
does life hold anything better?
- Beverly Nichols

I am led to reflect how much more delightful to an undebauched mind, is the task
of making improvements on the earth, than all the vain glory which can be
acquired from ravaging it, by the most uninterrupted career of conquests.
- George Washington

All of earth is crammed with heaven
And every bush aflame with God
But only those who see take off their shoes.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

It is apparent that no lifetime is long enough in which
to explore the resources of a few square yards of ground.
- Alice M. Coats

It is only when we are aware of the earth
and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.
- Henry Beston, 1935, Herbs and the Earth

The body repeats the landscape.
They are the source of each other and create each other.
- Meridel Le Sueur

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

Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.
- Gary Snyder

If a chieftain or a man leave his house, garden, and field and hires it out, and
some one else takes possession of his house, garden, and field and uses it for three
years; if the first owner return and claims his house, garden, and field, it shall not be
given to him, but he who has taken possession of it and used it shall continue to use it.
- Code of Hammurabi, 1792 B.C.

Give me strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is.
- Black Elk

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go
outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens,
nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should
be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of
nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that
then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the
circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings
solace in all troubles.
- Anne Frank

I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead,
few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.
- A Chief from Nigeria

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely
shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and
music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.
- Lord Byron

The essential ingredient in a temenos is the perimeter that marks
out the space, whether by a wall, a fence, a hedge of flowers and
bushes, or some rocks that only imply the full perimeter. Having
crossed the border, we find ourselves in a special place where
certain things happen and other things do not.
- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, p. 293

All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil . . . .
- William Butler Yeats, The Municipal Gallery Revisited

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what
is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty
to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only
paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need,
if only we had the eyes to see ... No, wilderness is not a luxury
but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives
as water and good bread.
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly,
that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an
impression of beauty and delight.
- Gertrude Jekyll

O Goddess Earth, O all-enduring wide expanses!
Salutation to thee.
Now I am going to begin cultivation.
Be pleased, O virtuous One.
- Ancient Sanskrit prayer

The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest.  Mud-pies
gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of
pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild oats, drifted about the world,
and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of
looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him, as
he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there.
-   Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden, 1870

Quotes for Gardeners

A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clich�s, Adages
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot.
- Alexander Pope, 1688-1744

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The best stock a man can invest in, is the stock of a farm;
the best shares are plow shares; and the best banks are the
fertile banks of a rural stream; the more these are broken
the better dividends they pay.
- Henry Ward Beecher

There are times when I cannot believe I am separate from this earth,
when I could swear the wind blows through me as it does the woven
needles of the pine tree by the creek, when I feel my feet planted
deep in the earth with the roots of trees and wildflowers,
drawing essence."
- Cathy Johnson

Do the best that you can in the place where you are, and be kind.
- Scott Nearing

It always comes to the same necessity: go deep enough
and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
- May Sarton

You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.
- Anonymous

The disciples are drawn to the high altars with magnetic certainty,
knowing that a great Presence hovers over the ranges ... You were
within the portals of the temple ... to enter the wilderness and seek,
in the primal patterns of nature, a magical union with beauty.
- Ansel Adams, Sierra Club Bulletin, 1931

I don't know. Sometimes it would stop raining long enough for the stars
to come out. Then it was nice ... It's like just before the sun goes to bed
down on the bay, those million sparkles on the water... Like that mountain
lake, it was so clear, Jenny, it looked like two skies, one on top of the other.
And then in the desert when the sun comes up, I couldn't tell where heaven
started and the earth begun. It's so beautiful ... Jenny, I may not be a
smart man, but I know what love is.
- Forrest Gump

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an
illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.
- Aleister Crowley

Soil is a resource, a living, breathing entity that, if treated properly, will maintain itself.
It's our lifeline for survival. When it has finally been depleted, the human population
will disappear. .... Project you imagination into the soil below you next time you go
into the garden. Think with compassion of the life that exists there. Think, the drama,
the sexuality, the harvesting, the work that carries on ceaselessly. Think about the
meaning of being a steward for the earth.
- Marjorie Harris, In the Garden, 1995

If we do not permit the Earth to produce beauty and joy,
it will in the end not produce food either.
Joseph Wood Krutch

US House Speaker Tip O'Neill used to say all politics is local,
and the same must be said of gardening, where regional climate
and soil patterns determine what will thrive and what will die.
Besides, gardening is about developing a relationship with
where you live, right down to the unique quality of the light,
the acid in the rain, the rocks in the soil.
- Carol Stocker

Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible?
Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible?
Earth! Invisible!
What, if not change, is your desperate mission?
- R. M. Rilke, Duino Elegy - Ninth

The green earth sends her incense up.
From many a mountain shrine;
From folded leaf and dewey cup
She pours her sacred wine.
- John Greenleaf Whittier

In order for something to become clean,
something else must become dirty.
- Imbesi's Conservation of Filth Law

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
- John Ruskin

Maybe if I listen closely to the rocks
Next time, I'll hear something, if not
A word, perhaps the faint beginning
of a syllable.
- Phoebe Hanson

I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers;
he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs
himself into the earth and leaves the sight of what is on it to us
gaping good-for-nothings. He lives buried in the ground. He
builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the
Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say:
"Good Lord, what humus!"
- Karel Capek, The Gardener's Year, 1931

All clays are pretty well unworkable with ordinary implements. For the melted
toffee consistency of winter, you might prefer a large soup-ladle; for light
working over summer, a hammer and cold chisel. Is the soil always too wet or
too dry? No, there's a period - usually a day or two in May - when you can
actually use a fork.
- John Lucas, Backs to the Garden Wall

There are fairies at the bottom of our garden.
- Rose Fyleman

The earth neither grows old or wears out if it is dunged.
- Columella, circa 45 A.D.

Fertilizer - Quotes for Gardeners

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents,
it was loaned to you by your children.
We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our Children.
- Ancient Indian Proverb

Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains,
her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.
- Henry Beston

To reach a great height a person needs to have great depth.
- Anonymous

I conjure you, my brethren, to remain faithful to earth, and do not believe
those who speak unto you of superterrestrial hopes!
Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Remain true to the earth.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Nature does have manure and she does have roots as well as blossoms,
and you can't hate the manure and blame the roots for not being blossoms.
- Buckminster Fuller

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses
are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.
- John Stuart Mill, 1806 - 1873

In matters of style, swim with the current;
in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
- Thomas Jefferson

When you throw dirt, you lose ground.
- Texan proverb

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
- Thoreau

No sooner did I bend over and scratch the soil with the hoe that I began to unearth
bits and pieces ... of my past. Memories forever rooted in time were clustered in my
garden consciousness like potatoes, waiting, crying to be dug up. ...
I plant flowers and vegetables. I harvest memories - and life.
- Nancy H. Jordan, 1993

I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died.
- Richard Diran

Nature abhors a vacuity
Especially in perpetuity
She finds her felicity
In asymmetricity
And notices no incongruity.
- Jim Clatfelter

Nothing can be created out of nothing.
"Nil posse creari De nilo."
- Lucretius, 99 - 55 B.C.

Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication,
and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to
a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
- Author Unknown

Seldom do we realize that the world is practically no thicker to us than the
print of our footsteps on the path. Upon that surface we walk and act
our comedy of life, and what is beneath is nothing to us. But it is out from
that under-world, from the dead and the unknown, from the cold
moist ground, that these green blades have sprung.
- Richard Jefferies

I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of
excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider
its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate
monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs,
terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still
crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His
gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow,
however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant
from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.

- Wallace Stevens, Letters, p. 73

There is nothing pleasanter than spading
when the ground is soft and damp.
- John Steinbeck

To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.
- Dogen

The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God.
- Benedict De Spinoza, 1632 - 1677

God is in the details.
Mies Van Der Rohe

Details are all there are.
- Maezumi

You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.

Seeds - Quotes for Gardeners

There are two lasting bequests we can give our children:
one is roots. The other is wings.
- Hodding Carter, Jr.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon
stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and
antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree,
which precede flowers and fruit - not a fossil earth, but a living
earth; compared with whose great central life all animal
and vegetable life is merely parasitic.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

There is a great pleasure in working in the soil, apart from the ownership of it.
The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something
for the good of the world.
- Charles Dudley Warner, 1870

Gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.
- Sir Thomas Browne

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You are always picking up odd-shaped stones, pebbles and fossils, saying that you do this
because it pleases you, but I know better. Deep inside you there must be an awareness of the
rock power, of the spirits in them, otherwise you would not pick them up and fondle them as you do.
- Lame Deer, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions

Soil . . . scoop up a handful of the magic stuff. Look at it closely.
What wonders it holds as it lies there in your palm. Tiny sharp
grains of sand, little faggots of wood and leaf fiber, infinitely small
round pieces of marble, fragments of shell, specks of black carbon,
a section of vertebrae from some minute creature. And mingling
with it all the dust of countless generations of plants and flowers,
trees, animals and – yes – our own, age-long forgotten forebears,
gardeners of long ago. Can this incredible composition be
the common soil?
- Stuart Maddox Masters, The Seasons Through

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.
- Baron Thomas B. Macaulay, 1800 - 1859

Winter is the season dominated by bare soil: the whole gardening cycle
begins with the care and preparation of the earth during winter so that
it will feed plants the following year. One of the things I enjoy about
digging (and there are lots of things I enjoy about it) is the smell of the
earth that is released by the spade cutting in and lifting clods that have
been buried for a year. Not only does the soil itself have a real scent,
but the roots of the crop or plant - even weed - that has been growing
there will also contribute to the mix, creating something new out of the
vague remnants of last season's garden.
- Monty Don, The Sensuous Garden, 1997

Most of all one discovers that the soil does not stay the same,
but, like anything alive, is always changing and telling its own story.
Soil is the substance of transformation.
- Carol Williams

Since the history's first epic poem recorded the visit of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh
to a special grove of cedars, certain natural spots scattered around the world - Ayers
Rock, Mount Fuji, Canyon de Chelly, the springs at Lourdes, the Ganges River, and
hundreds of others - have drawn people seeking insight, inspiration,
healing or proximity to the divine.
- Winifred Gallagher, The Power of Place, 1993

Gardeners Know All The Dirt.
- Popular saying

All you under the heaven!
Regard heaven as your father,
earth as your mother,
and all things as your brothers and sisters.
- Shinto saying

If we do not permit the Earth to produce beauty and joy,
it will in the end not produce food either.
- Joseph Wood Krutch

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is
more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.
- Helen Keller

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open
face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods
of the season, holding nothing back.
- Willa Cather

from wet clay
where no seed will grow
the worm
- Elizabeth St. Jacques, Poetry in the Light

We're electrical beings living in a magnetic environment. ... Because we're finely tuned to
subtle energy fields, when they vary, as they would on top of a mountain, we change
biologically and psychologically too.
- Louis Slesin

Just as a prism of glass miters light and casts a colored braid, a
garden sings sweet incantations the human heart strains to hear.
Hiding in every flower, in every leaf, in every twig and bough, are
reflections of the God who once walked with us in Eden.
- Tonia Triebwasser, The Color of Grace

Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.
- William Alexander, A Father's Book, 1997

Quotes for Gardeners

A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by Over 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clich�s, Adages
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth,
with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as
firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more
invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you
forth anew to the new striving and suffering. And not merely "some day." Now,
today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon
thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over.
- Erwin Schroedinger, My View of the World, 1964, p.21

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,
no culture comparable to that of the garden ...
But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.
- Thomas Jefferson, Garden Book, 1811

The real lowdown on gardening is ... dirt.
- Texas Bix Bender

Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in Nature -
daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it -
rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks.
The solid earth!
- Henry David Thoreau

Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.
- Ralph W. Emerson, 1803 - 1882

To dig deep into the actual and get something out of that --
this doubtless is the right way to live.
- Henry James

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons.
It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed of perfection.
- Walt Whitman, Song of the Universal

The farther we get away from the land, the greater our insecurity.
- Henry Ford

Tread softly! A signpost in one garden reads:
Your feet are killing me!

There is always something rough and tumble about planting -
because with our clumsy implements we must
reach from our atmospheric element down into another,
down into the darkness of the soil.
- Stanley Crawford

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
- Hannah Arendt

Consult the Genius of the Place in all.
- Alexander Pope

Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.
- James A. Garfield

The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they
are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because
they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred, the
ganz andere or 'wholly other.'
- Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries

The golden rule of gardening is to pay attention
to local conditions of weather and soil.
- Carol Williams

I am open to the accusation that I see compost as an end it itself. But we do grow
some real red damn tomatoes such as you can't get in the stores. And potatoes,
beans, lettuce, collards, onions, squash, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, peppers.
Dirt in you own backyard, producing things you eat. Makes you wonder.
- Roy Blount, Jr.

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Mountains and rivers at this very moment are the actualization
of the world of the ancient Buddhas. Each, abiding in its
phenomenal expression, realizes completeness.
- Dogen

"At the time Gothic cathedrals were designed, most people lived in dark huts,
so just walking into a space vastly larger than what they were habituated to,
lit by stained glass windows, was literally awe-inspiring. Today, we're not
as impressed by big buildings, so we have to go to very large mountains
to experience that 'diminutive effect.'"
- M. A. Persinger

Sitting in my garden at midnight staring at the stars
can also produce that 'diminutive effect.'
- Mike Garofalo

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By the deficiency or absence of one necessary constituent, all the
others being present, the soil is rendered barren for all those crops
to the life of which that one constituent is indispensable.
- Julius von Liebig, German physical soil chemist,
Law of the Minimum, 1840

A man's feet should be planted in his country,
but his eyes should survey the world.
- George Santayana

Holy Mother Earth, the trees and all nature,
are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds.
- Winnebago Saying

Spade! Thou art a tool of honor in my hands.
I press thee, through a yielding soil, with pride.
- William Wordsworth

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
- Walt Whitman, A Song of the Rolling Earth

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed,
I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that
I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others
do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

God gives all men all earth to love,
But, since man's hear is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.
- Rudyard Kipling, 1865 - 1936

The Country is both the Philosopher's Garden and his Library,
in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.
- William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude In Reflections And Maxims, 1682

The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
- Willem de Kooning

No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he
can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles
deep; and that is a very handsome property.
- Charles Dudley Warner

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
- Margaret Atwood

It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that
we realized how small and how helpless this planet is -
something that we must hold in our arms and care for.
- Margaret Mead

As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is
a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the
infinity of space - it will seem increasingly absurd
that we have not better organized the life
of the human family.
- Hubert H. Humphrey

And what a congress of stinks!-
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks,
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
- Theodore Roethke, Root Cellar, 1948

Remember that the faith that moves mountains always carries a pick.
- Anonymous

Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855, I Celebrate Myself, Line 439

God owns heaven, but He craves the earth.
- Anne Sexton

A spark in the sun,
this tiny flower has roots
deep in the cool earth.
- Harry Behn

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Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over
every living thing that moves upon the earth.
- Genesis 1:28

It is always a great pleasure, and surprise, when you happen on
just the perfect place in which to plant some special treasure.
- Margery Fish

I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession
of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an
isolation is unimaginable. If we are to realize and maintain our humanity, we must
come to a moral comprehension of earth and air as it is perceived in the long
turn of seasons and of years.
- N. Scott Momaday

We go, in winter's biting wind,
On many a short-lived winter day,
With aching back but willing mind
To dig and double dig the clay.
- Ruth Pitter, 1897-1992, The Diehards, 1941

Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger
and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also. One's own
landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself;
he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own
moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut
those trees, and he bleeds; mar those hills, and he suffers. How has
the farmer planted himself in his fields; builded himself into his
stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills by his struggle!
This home feeling, this domestication of nature, is important to
the observer. This is the birdlime with which he catches the bird;
this is the private door that admits him behind the scenes."
- John Burroughs, 1837 - 1921

The land now desolate will be tilled, instead of lying waste
for every passer-by to see. Everyone will say that this land
which was waste has now become like a Garden of Eden.
- Ezekiel 36:34-35

The old people came literally to love the soil and they
sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close
to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch
the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins
and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were
built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The
birds that flew into the air came to rest upon the earth and it
was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew.
The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.
- Chief Luther Standing Bear

Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent
muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons
of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and
convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.
- John Ruskin

What will I do when I can no longer dig?
- Knute Hamson, Growth of the Soil

Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute
between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and
the centre of man's universe is the earth?
- Stephen Vizinczey

Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands
which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes
a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has
never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they
were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919

A hole is nothing at all, but you can still break your neck in it.
- Author Unknown

Keep your eyes on the stars, keep your feet on the ground.
- Theodore Roosevelt

A man who does not ask to much
become the promise of his land.
His marriage married
to his place, he waits
and does not stray.
-Wendell Berry, The Clearing

It is a sacred house that I have come to,
It is a sacred house that I have come to, Holaghei.
Now I have come to the House of the Earth.
--Navajo song

To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful
in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves
as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright
loveliness in the unending night - brothers who see now
they are truly brothers.
- Archibald MacLeish

We have nowhere else to go ... this is all we have.
- Margaret Mead

When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.
- William Hazlitt

Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather an inanimate
vegetable, draws in aethereal breath for its dayly refreshment and
vitall ferment and transpires again grosses exhalations. And,
according to the condition of all other things living, ought to
have its time of beginning, youth, old age and perishing.
- Isaac Newton, 1705

For here the religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals
shame-faced to hide itself in dim churches, flourishes greatly, filling
the soul with a solemn joy. Face to face with Nature on the vast
hills at eventide, who does not feel himself near to the Unseen?
- W. H. Hudson, The Purple Land

Wherever you are is home
And the earth is paradise
Wherever you set your feet is holy land . . .
You don't live off it like a parasite.
You live in it, and it in you,
Or you don't survive.
And that is the only worship of God there is.
- Wilfred Pelletier and Ted Poole

I have sat here happy in the gardens,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds....
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones,
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them.
- Richard Aldington, 1892-1962, Au Vieux Jardin

                                                    What
                                                    has happened
                                                    makes

                                                    the world.
                                                    Live
                                                    on the edge,

                                                    looking.

                                                                       - Robert Creeley, Here

The word humility (also human) is derived from the Latin humus, meaning
"the soil." Perhaps this is not simply because it entails stooping and
returning to earthly origins, but also because, as we are rooted in this
earth of everyday life, we find in it all the vitality and fertility unnoticed
by people who merely tramp on across the surface,
drawn by distant landscapes.
- Piero Ferrucci, Inevitable Grace

Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over - one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the first.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 9th, 1923

Going deeper
And deeper still
Green Mountains
- Santoka

The Earth Is Our Mother

The Earth is our mother, we must take care of her
The Earth is our mother, we must take care of her.

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.
Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take
Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take.

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.

The Sky is our father, we must take care of him
The Sky is our father, we must take care of him

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.

The Rivers are our sisters, we must take care of them
The Rivers are our sisters, we must take care of them.

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.

The Trees are our brothers, we must take care of them
The Trees are our brothers, we must take care of them.

Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.

- Hopi (Native American, Arizona) Chant

Pagan Chant Library

A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth
lie lodged in the heart of every human being.
- Thomas Moore

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet
is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the
land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of
our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children,
that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls
the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground,
they spit upon themselves.
- Native American Wisdom

The land is a mother that never dies.
- Maori Proverb

God does not die on that day when we cease to believe in a personal
deity, but we die when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady
radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond
all reasoning. ... When the sense of the earth unites with the sense
of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants,
an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the
body is confirmed in its pantheism.
- Dag Hammarskjold

I pledge devotion to the earth, our one and only home,
and to the life this earth sustains;
one nation, one spirit indivisible,
with freedom and fulfillment for all.
- Bruce Hagen, New Pledge of Allegiance, 1983

Land is the place where lessons are taught,
where Wisdom abides; where we learn lessons
about life and death from the seed broken
open in darkness, dying in order to come
to life in a different form, and from the compost
which teaches us that decay is needed for
life's richness. Land is the place where we
are healed when no words can comfort or explain.
It is the place where we are taught about
and find community; where everything is
connected to everything else, and nothing
exists independently; the place where
everything feeds on and depends on the other.
- Jeanne Clark

Links and References

Soil, Ground, Stones, Rocks

Compost Research Page

Gardening in Clay Soil. By Sara Pitzer. Pownal, Vermont, Storey Books, 1995. A Storey Country
Wisdom Bulletin. 32 pages. Storey Books also offers "Gardening in Sandy Soil."

Improving the Soil. By Erin Hynes. Rodale's Successful Organic Gardening Improving the Soil.
Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Rodale Press, 1994. Index, 160 pages. ISBN: 0-87596-617-9.

The Nature and Properties of Soils. By Nyle C. Brady. New York, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984.
Ninth Edition. Index, glossary, 750 pages. Mr. Brady is a professor at Cornell University and member
of the United States Agency for International Development.

Mother Earth. Biodynamic and Organic Gardening Resource Site.

North American Rock Garden Society

The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions.
By Winifred Gallagher. New York, Harper/Collins, 1993. Notes, index, 240 pages.

Readings to Lift a Gardener's Spirits. Prepared by Michael P. Garofalo. An annotated bibliography
in progress. From the Spirit of Gardening Website.

Rock Samadhi. By John McClellan. 20K+.

Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events. By M.A. Persinger and G.F. Lafreniere.
Nelson Hall, 1977.

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More Quotes

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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

Clich�s for Gardeners and Farmers

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

Short Poems by Mike Garofalo

Seeing and Vision

Beauty in the Garden

Seasons and Time

Comments about this Web Site

Jokes, Riddles and Humor

The Spirit of Gardening

Quotes for Gardeners

Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clich�s, 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