Essentials

Definitions of Gardening and Gardeners

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


Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.

Gushen Grove, Valley Spirit Center, Red Bluff, California
Green Way Research


 

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"As the biocentric view suggests, the garden prospers when control is balanced by equal measures of humility and benevolence.  A balance is struck.  Control, servitude, respect, imagination, pragmatism, an ecological conscience, compliance, and a certain measure of mysticism and altruism all meld together to provide nurturance.  Try to separate the various aspects into their constituent parts - grant any one of them the status of fundamental gardening definition and one soon skews the entire process.  Put them back together again in the service of the two-way street called nurturance, and we express the state of grace called gardening."
-  Jim Nollman, Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place, 1994

 

 

"Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation.  It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart."
-  Karel Capek

 

 

"As the biocentric view suggests, the garden prospers when control is balanced by equal measures of humility and benevolence.  A balance is struck.  Control, servitude, respect, imagination, pragmatism, an ecological conscience, compliance, and a certain measure of mysticism and altruism, all meld together to provide nurturance."
-  Jim Nollman, Why We Garden

 

 

"I have found, through years of practice, that people garden in order to make something grow; to interact with nature; to share, to find sanctuary, to heal, to honor the earth, to leave a mark.  Through gardening, we feel whole as we make our personal work of art upon our land."
-  Julie Moir Messervy, The Inward Garden, 1995

 

 

"Gardening is ultimately a folly whose goal is to provide delight."
Deborah Needleman

 

 

"Seek to understand what draws you to the garden.  You may discover greater rewards than the blue ribbons awarded for the biggest pumpkin or the best preserves.  You may find the garden becomes a teacher and crop "failures" become lessons learned.  However big or small your garden is, if you allow nature to touch your spirit, gardening will bring returns of peace, satisfaction, and well-being for as long as you continue to wander the garden path."
-   Norman H. Hansen,
The Worth of Gardening

 

 

"The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part plowman.  He modifies the climate around his home."
-  John R. Whiting

 

 

"Gardening is an exercise in optimism.  Sometimes, it is a triumph of hope over experience."
-  Marina Schinz

 

 

 

Quotes for Gardeners

Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, Proverbs, Maxims, and Insights
Quotes for Those Who Love Gardens, Gardening, and the Green Way
Arranged by Over 250 Topics.  Over 18 Megabytes of Text.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

 

 

 

"Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas."
-  Elizabeth Murray

 

 

"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, 1666

 

 

"A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith, the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise."
-  Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener, 1962

 

 

"Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.  What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness.  A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content."
-  Ken Wilbur, Grace and Grit

 

 

"Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are."
-  Alfred Austin

 

 

"Gardening is any way that humans and nature come together with the intent of creating beauty."
-  Tina James

 

 

"Garden: One of a vast number of free outdoor restaurants operated by charity-minded amateurs in an effort to provide healthful, balanced
meals for insects, birds and animals."
-   Henry Beard and Roy McKie, Gardener's Dictionary

 

 

 

 

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"It is always exciting to open the door and go out into the garden for the first time on any day."
-  Marion Cran

 

 

"Gardening is medicine that does not need a prescription ... And with no limit on dosage."
-  Author unknown

 

 

"Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself."
-   May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968

 

 

"What, if anything, do the infinity of different traditional and individual ideas of a garden have in common?  They vary so much in purpose, in size, in style and content that not even flowers, or even plants at all, can be said to be essential.  In the last analysis there is only one common factor between all gardens, and this is the control of nature by man.  Control, that is, for aesthetic reasons. .... The essence is control.  Without constant watchful care a garden - any garden - rapidly returns to the state of the country all around it."
- Hugh Johnson, The Principles of Gardening, 1979

 

 

"I don't think we'll ever know all there is to know about gardening, and I'm just as glad there will always be some magic about it!"
-  Barbara Damrosch

 

 

"A garden always gives back more than it receives."
-   Mara Beamish

 

 

"The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied.  They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before."
-  Vita Sackville-West, 1892 - 1962

 

 

"You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."
-  Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Little Prince

 

 

"He who cultivates a garden, and brings to perfection flowers and fruits cultivates and advances at the same time his own nature."
-  Ezra Weston, 1845

 

 

"This garden is no metaphor ─
more a task that swallows you into itself,
earth using, as always, everything it can."
-  Jan Hirshfield, November, Remembering Voltaire

 

 

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

 

 

"Gardening gives me fun and health and knowledge.  It gives me laughter and colour.  It gives me pictures of almost incredible beauty."
-  John F. Kenyon

 

 

"Gardens are not created or made, they unfold, spiraling open like the silk petals of an evening primrose flower to reveal the ground plot of the mind and heart of the gardener and the good earth."
-  Wendy Johnson, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, 2000

 

 

"The garden is a ground plot for the mind."
-  Thomas Hill, 1577

 

 

"Agriculture probably required a far greater discipline than did any form of food collecting.  Seeds had to be planted at certain seasons, some protection had to be given to the growing plants and animals, harvests had to be reaped, stored and divided.  Thus, we might argue that it was neither leisure time nor a sedentary existence but the more rigorous demands associated with an agricultural way of life that led to great cultural changes."
-  Charles Heiser, Seed to Civilization

 

 

"Nature does not complete things.  She is chaotic.  Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall."
-  Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

 

 

"I garden, therefore I am."
Shelly's Space

 

 

"Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green glade ...

Such was that happy garden-state, ..."
-  Andrew Marvell, The Garden

 

 

"Why do plants have such a positive impact on us? 
There are a number of reasons, including:
They have a predictable cycle of life that provides comfort in our time of rapid change.
They are responsive but non-threatening.
They form no opinions or judgments about their caregivers.
They soften our man-made environment.
They enable us to change or improve our environment.
They promote relaxation and tranquility."
-  Gardening - Therapy for Mind, Body and Soul, Proxima Health System, Atlanta

 

 

 

 


 

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"The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives."
-  Gertrude Jekyll

 

 

"When your garden is finished I hope it will be more beautiful that you anticipated, require less care than you expected, 
and have cost only a little more than you had planned."   
Thomas D. Church

 

 

"A callused palm and dirty fingernails precede a Green Thumb.
Wishes are like seeds, few ever develop into something.
Sitting in a garden and doing nothing is high art everywhere.
Beauty is the Mistress, the gardener Her slave. 
Complexity is closer to the truth. 
When all the chores are done, the avid gardener will invent some new ones.
Where are the fig blossoms?  Exceptions to every rule.
Only two percent of all insects are harmful.  Why are they all in my garden?
The joyful gardener is evidence of an incarnation.  
As with most arts, gardening is an expression of our hands. 
To dig is to discover. 
The ten thousand things are more enchanting than the Silent One.  
To lift the mind, move the body. 
Gardening is a slower path to a richer sensuality. 
To garden is to open your heart to the sky.
The road to flourishing needs regular maintenance and repairs.
The present is merely a fleeting moment; we actually unearth our essence in our past and create ourselves in the future.
Having a poor memory helps a great deal in finding happiness. 
A garden is a feeling. 
Absolutes squirm beneath realities. 
Your never too old to embrace a stupid idea. 
The end of the garden is at the end of a hose. 
A gardener loves the rain; also, for the resting time it brings.
In general, be more specific. 
The Laws of Gardening are mostly local ordinances. 
Sitting in a garden and doing nothing is high art everywhere. 
Gardening is but one battle against Chaos."
-  Michael P. Garofalo,
Pulling Onions
   Over 890 ideas, quips, observations, thoughts, and reflections of a philosophical gardener. 

 

 

"The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world."
-  Charles Dudley Warner

 

 

"Gardening is a humbling experience."
-  Martha Stewart

 

 

"Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another." 
-  Robert Harbison

 

 

"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 the 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

 

 

"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

 

 

"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 Western Sydney, Australia

 

 

"The word 'garden' comes from the Old English 'geard', meaning a fence or enclosure, and from 'garth' meaning a yard or a piece of enclosed ground.  The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology gives the meaning of garden as 'enclosed cultivated ground' and The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as 'an enclosed piece of ground devoted to the cultivation of flowers, fruit or vegetables'.   Enclosure is essential to gardening, and this raises fundamental questions, such as who is doing the enclosing, who owns the land, and who is being kept out."
-  Martin Hoyles, The Story of Gardening, 1991

 

 

"I also know that we should cultivate our gardens."
-  Voltaire, Candide

 

 

"People are turning to their gardens not to consume but to actively create, not to escape from reality but to observe it closely.  In doing this they experience the connectedness of creation and the profoundest sources of being.  That the world we live in and the activity of making it are one seamless whole is something that we may occasionally glimpse.  In the garden, we know."
-  Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life, 1998

 

 

"We may talk what we please," he cries in his enthusiasm for the oldest of the arts, "of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles, in fields d'or or d'argent; but, if heraldry were guided by reason, a plough in a field arable would be the most noble and ancient arms."
-  Abraham Cowley (1618-1667),  Of Agriculture, 1650

 

 

 

 

  
Months and Seasons
Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Verses, Lore, Myths, Holidays
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Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
 

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"A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul."
-  Sadi

 

 

"I'll plant and water, sow and weed,
Till not an inch of earth shows brown,
And take a vow of each small seed
To grow to greenness and renown:
And then some day you'll pass my way,
See gold and crimson, bell and star,
And catch my garden's soul, and say:
"How sweet these cottage gardens are!" "
-  Edith Nesbit, the poem Seed-Time and Harvest from the Pomander of Verse, 1895

 

 

"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

 

 

"Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination."
-  Alice Morse Earle, 1897, Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden

 

 

"I shall only instance in one delight more, the most natural and best-natured of all others, a perpetual companion of the husbandman; and that is, the satisfaction of looking round about him, and seeing nothing but the effects and improvements of his own art and diligence; to be always gathering of some fruits of it, and at the same time to behold others ripening, and others budding: to see all his fields and gardens covered with the beauteous creatures of his own industry; and to see, like God, that all his works are good."
-  Abraham Cowley (1618-1667),  Of Agriculture, 1650

 

 

"Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome."
-  Emily Dickinson, No. 324, St. 1, 1862   

 

 

"We men of Earth have here the stuff
Of Paradise - we have enough!
We need no other stones to build
The Temple of the Unfulfilled -
No other ivory for the doors -
No other marble for the floors -
No other cedar for the beam
And dome of man's immortal dream.

Here on the paths of every-day -
Here on the common human way
Is all the stuff the gods would take
To build a Heaven, to mold and make
New Edens. Ours is the stuff sublime
To build Eternity in time!" 
-  Edwin Markham, Earth is Enough

 

 

"Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!"
-  Rudyard Kipling, The Glory of the Garden

 

 

"Strength may wield the ponderous spade,
May turn the clod, and wheel the compost home;
But elegance, chief grace the garden shows,
And most attractive, is the fair result
Of thought, the creature of a polished mind."
-  William Cowper

 

 

"There is more pleasure in making a garden than in contemplating a paradise."
-  Anne Scott-James

 

 

"I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to." 
-  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings 

 

 

"A garden is the best alternative therapy." 
-  Germaine Greer  

 

 

"There be delights that will fetch the day about from sun to sun and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream ... For a garden is Arcady brought home.  It is man's bit of gaudy make-believe - his well-disguised fiction of an unvexed Paradise ... a world where gayety knows no eclipse and winter and rough weather are held at bay."
-  John D. Sedding, Garden-Craft, 1893

 

 

"In all things of nature there is something marvelous."  
-  Aristotle 

 

 

"Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction."
-  Edward O. Wilson

 

 

"Gardening helps us realize somatically, viscerally, the laws of growth and gradual unfolding.  We can't pull the plants up to make them grow, but we can help facilitate and midwife their blooming, each in his own way, time, and proper season.  I have learned a little about patience and humility from my gardens.  It's so obviously not something I'm doing that creates this miracle!  I also like to reflect upon and appreciate the exquisitely, evanescent, transitory, and poignant nature of things in the garden.  If you love the Dharma, you have to farm it. Go to a garden.  Just stand in it.  Breathe in the air, the fragrances, the light, the temperature, the music of the different plants, insects, birds, worms, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and butterflies.  Inhale the prana (cosmic energy) of all the abundantly growing things.  Recharge your inner batteries.  This is the joy of natural meditation."
-  Lama Surya Das, Awakening to the Sacred, 1999

 

 

"It is only when you start a garden - probably after age fifty - that you realize something important happens every day." 
-  Geoffrey B. Charlesworth  

 

 

"A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again."
-  Robinson Jeffers  

 

 

 

 

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"When a man sits down in front of a garden, or strolls around in it, he steeps himself in delight.  Because the garden is a paradise where a garden owner and a landscape gardener share the same dream in their common culture.  Man first made a garden to try to produce a paradise in this world.  The garden seems to be a paradise of the other world somewhere out of sight."
-  Masaaki Noda, Dialogue with a Garden

 

 

"If it's drama that you sigh for, plant a garden and you'll get it
You will know the thrill of battle fighting foes that will beset it
If you long for entertainment and for pageantry most glowing,
Plant a garden and this summer spend your time with green things growing."
-  Edward A. Guest,
Plant a Garden

 

 

"Nature in the garden is nature tamed, cultivated, made subservient to human purpose, brought into subjection to conscious purpose. A garden is not merely a piece of nature fenced in near the house, like a wolf chained at the back door; but nature cultivated and trained like a dog tamed and trained for human ends. Art in the garden is the human element appropriating and elevating the natural for human purpose."
-  Abram Linwood Urban
 

 

"A garden isn't meant to be useful.  It's for joy."
-  Rumer Godden

 

 

"Gardening is the purest of human pleasures."
-  Francis Bacon

 

 

"People who love this world, people who pay attention, are gardeners.  People who are invested, people who are aware.  They are gardeners
regardless of whether or not they have ever picked up a trowel.  Because gardening is not just about digging.  Or planting, for that
matter.  Gardening is about cherishing."
-  Terry Hershey,  Soul Gardening

 

 

"Gardening takes a plot of land, a hoe and willing muscles.  Scratching the soil, harvesting garden fruits, are peaceful results. 
With a garden, there is hope."
-  Grace Firth

 

 

"Every garden is a chore sometimes, but no real garden is nothing but a chore."
-  Nancy Grasby

 

 

"A garden is the place millions of people go to touch the earth, to smell flowers - to use some of that fabled human brainpower in the cause of better participating with natural processes in the place they call home.  It serves as an art project, an organic produce market, a spiritual practice, a pharmacy.   It offers ongoing lessons in ecology, biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology.  Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time.  It bestows on its practitioners a genuine sense of admiration for the plants, the soil, the sun, the water."
-  Jim Nollman, Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place, 1994

 

 

"All gardeners know that in some way they work out their problems in the garden.  There is no mystery to it.  They are simply following Nature's laws.  Planting a garden is an act of optimism."
-  Marilyn Barrett, Creating Eden

 

 

"Gardens are a form of autobiography."
-  Robert Dash, Horticulture 1993

 

 

"The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn't simple."
Doris Janzen Longacre

 

 

"God Almighty first planted a garden; and indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.  It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks."
-  Frances Bacon, 1625

 

 

"The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses."
-  Hanna Rion

 

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Quotes for Gardeners

Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, Proverbs, Maxims, and Insights
Quotes for Those Who Love Gardens, Gardening, and the Green Way
Arranged by Over 250 Topics.  Over 18 Megabytes of Text.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

 

 

 

 

"A garden should be in a constant state of fluid change, expansion, experiment, adventure; above all it should be an inquisitive, loving, but self-critical journey on the part of its owner."
-  H. E. Bates

 

 

"He who plants a garden plants happiness.
If you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden."
-  Chinese Proverbs

 

 

"The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the
hands of others to command."
-   J.R.R. Tolkien,  The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee

 

 

"A small garden, accordingly, gives its owner a far greater opportunity to express himself ... in a garden any man may be an artist, may experiment with all the subtleties or simplicities of line, mass, color, and composition, and taste the god-like joys of the creator."
-  H. G. Dwight, Gardens and Gardening, Atlantic Monthly, 1912

 

 

"If there's one thing I can say about my garden, it can always surprise me."
-  David Hobson
, The Mad Gardener

 

 

"Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow."
-  Author Unknown

 

 

"In my garden there is a large place for sentiment.  My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams.  The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful."
-  Abram L. Urban

 

 

"To garden, you open your personal space to admit a few, a great many, or thousands of plants which exude charm, pleasure, beauty, oxygen, conversation, friendship, confidence, and other rewards should you succeed in meeting their basic needs.  This is why people garden.  It can be easy but challenging, and the rewards are priceless."
-  Tom Clothier, Gardening Walk and Talk

 

 

"Who loves a garden
Finds within his soul
Life's whole;
He hears the anthem of the soil
While ingrates toil;
And sees beyond his little sphere
The waving fronds of heaven, clear."
-  Louise Seymour Jones

 

 

"He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the plants, the waters, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments -
is the rich and royal man."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

"I make bean stalks, I'm A builder, like yourself."
-  Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Second April, 1921

 

 

"How often I admire the taste shown in the garden which, within the house, may be indifferent.  Here is an art which is today probably more perfect than at any previous time, one which does not break with the past, while it brings a sense of comely order, and a radiant beauty, to cottage and manor alike."
-  William Rothenstein, 1939

 

 

"What, if anything, do the infinity of different traditional and individual ideas of a garden have in common?  They vary so much in purpose, in size, in style and content that not even flowers, or even plants at all, can be said to be essential.  In the last analysis there is only one common factor between all gardens, and this is the control of nature by man.  Control, that is, for aesthetic reasons."
-  Hugh Johnson

 

 

"As is the garden such is the gardener.  A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds."
-  Francis Bacon

 

 

"In green old gardens, hidden away
From sight of revel and sound of strife,
Here I have leisure to breathe and move,
And to do my work in a nobler way;
To sing my songs, and to say my say;
To Dream my dreams, and to love my love;
To hold my faith, and to live my life.
Making the most of its shadowy day."
-  Violet Fane,  1843 - 1905,  In Green Old Gardens

 

 

"The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world.  It is a magical place because it is not divided.  The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed 
bushes.  Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality.  It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes."
-  Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, 1996 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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flow2.gif (27433 bytes)

 

 

 

 

 

"The principal value of a garden is not understood.  It is not to give the possessors vegetables and fruit (that can be better and cheaper done by the market-gardeners), but to teach him patience and philosophy, and the higher virtues - hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation."
-  Charles Dudley Warner, 1829-1900

 

 

"Gardens likewise are a product of the yearning which grows from the humiliations and dashed hopes of daily life, and are thus the reflection
and counter-image of a more beautiful world.  Designed to bridge borders, gardens shed light on the historical reality of their creation and creators.  Like all Utopias, they criticize a concrete political situation, social relationships, constrains and shortcomings."
-  Carl F. Schroer

 

 

"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

 

 

"Gardens are inevitably a trade-off of successes and failures."
-  Rebecca Rupp

 

 

"To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do."
-  Charles Dudley Warner

 

 

"How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence."
-  Benjamin Disraeli

 

 

"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, 1897-1992, The Diehards, 1941

 

 

"To create a garden is to search for a better world.  In our effort to improve on nature, we are guided by a vision of paradise.  Whether the result is a horticultural masterpiece or only a modest vegetable patch, it is based on the expectation of a glorious future.  This hope for the future is at the heart of all gardening."
-  Marina Schinz

 

 

"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

 

 

"Yes, in the poor man's garden grow
Far more than herbs and flowers -
Kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind,
And Joy for weary hours."
-   Mary Howitt, The Poor Man's Garden

 

 

"To dwell is to garden."
-  Martin Heidegger

 

 

"Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years."
-  Author Unknown

 

 

"A Garden, an Elaboratory, a Work - house, Improvements and Breeding, are pleasant and Profitable Diversions to the Idle and Ingenious: For here they miss Ill Company, and converse with Nature and Art; whose Variety are equally grateful and instructing; and preserve a good Constitution of Body and Mind."
-  William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude In Reflections And Maxims, 1682

 

 

"To garden is to let optimism get the better of judgment."
-  Eleanor Perenyi

 

 

"Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity."
Lindley Karstens

 

 

"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."
-  Prince De Ligne 

 

 

"My spirit was lifted and my soul nourished by my time in the garden.  It gave me a calm connection with all of life, and an awareness that remains with me now, long after leaving the garden."
-  Nancy Ross

 

 

 

Spirituality     Simplicity     Weeding     Work     Clichés     Pleasures     Haiku    

Months     Zen     History of Gardening     Time     Walking     Fitness     Grass         

Fruit     Rain     Vegetables     Family     Trees     Flowers     Ecology     Sunshine    

Touching     Seeing     Hearing     Smelling    Tasting     Sensing     Body-Mind    

Beauty     Tranquility     Solitude     Index     Cloud Hands Blog    

 

 

 

 

 


Quotes for Gardeners

Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, Proverbs, Maxims, and Insights
Quotes for Those Who Love Gardens, Gardening, and the Green Way
Arranged by Over 250 Topics.  Over 18 Megabytes of Text.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

 

 

 

"May we be good to plants and flowers.   May we take fine care of the places where they grow.  Earth won't have to shake and flood and burn so fiercely then.  The world will be more wide-awake and tuneful, a place where children - all beings - can bloom."
-  Maggie Streincrohn Davis, Glory! To the Flowers

 

 

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

 

 

"There are as many kinds of gardens as there are gardeners, and they define themselves across sharp aesthetic and philosophical lines: utility versus beauty; vegetables versus ornamentals; chemicals versus organics; formal style versus naturalistic.  Different countries breed different gardeners."
-  Abby Adams, What is a Garden Anyway

 

 

"Gardeners are key land managers.  Our choices therefore lie not in whether but in how we manage the land.  We would all agree that we must do it in an ecologically responsible way."
-  George Seddon,  Gardening Responsibility

 

 

"Wherever man exists, he finds the need to redesign, to recreate the world.  A more beautiful world, purer, sweeter smelling and more colorful.  A garden is probably the spot where the hopes for civilization are best captured.  In fact, man defines himself by his garden."
The Enchanted Gardens of the Renaissance

 

 

 

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"My Grandmother standing wordless
fifteen minutes                    

Between rows of loganberries,        
clippers poised in her hand."
-  Gary Snyder, The Old Dutch Woman

 

 

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

 

 

"Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens."
-   Edward O. Wilson, Consilience

 

 

"There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners.  Gardeners are the ones 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

 

 

"A garden is the mirror of a mind.  It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year, and pressing on and pausing the whole to its own inherent rhythms."
-  Henry Beston, 1935, Herbs and the Earth

 

 

"We are stardust,
we are golden,
and we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden."
-  Joni Mitchell

 

 

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

 

 

"I suppose when it comes right down to it, we garden because it's an old cold world, and sometimes the best a person can do is to give it children and some green things growing."
-  Rebecca Rupp

 

 

"The Chinese word for garden combines forms for soil, landforms, a well, and an enclosure plus trees.  It is generally interpreted as a man-made place for
recreation containing three elements: flowers, trees, fishpond;  buildings; and, an artificial mountain."

Chinese Landscape Gardening

 

 

"To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.  This is to have succeeded."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

How to Live a Good Life: Advice from Wise Persons     Virtues     Philosophy     Spirituality     Gratitude  

 

 

"When gardeners garden, it is not just plants that grow, but the gardeners themselves." 
-  Ken Druse

 

 

"The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn."
-   Wendell Berry, The Man Born to Farming, 1970

 

 

"Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying-out of gardens."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

"It occurred to me that agriculture considered as a medium does appear to have an "outside" - that is, gardening.  It's true that gardening is not the revolution, nor does gardening turn every gardener into a cultural radical. True, but perhaps in the long run less interesting than the fact that gardening remains 
prior to and outside agriculture, and the persistence of the garden represents some kind of dialectical negativity in relation to agriculture.  . . .   But gardening is not just critique.  It has a positive side.  It actually produces good food and other benefits that exist outside the complex of exchange, or at least somewhat outside.  That is, gardening is "praxis".  Moreover, it is an art form, an area of creativity as rich and promising as any symbolic activity, and one which can roughly but easily transpire beyond the realm of representation and mediation.  It can function as an important part of "every day life" in the radical sense of 
that term.  In short, it occurred to me that perhaps the only possible avant garde is the avant garden." 
-  Peter Lamborn Wilson, Avant Gardening

 

 

"How much the making of a garden, no matter how small, adds to the joy of living, only those who practice the arts and the science can know."
-   E. H. Wilson

 

 

"A garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature."
-  Jeff Cox

 

 

"Gardening, like sex and food, lies somewhere between art and nature, being wholly neither but partly both."
 -  Roger Grounds

 

 

"My spirit was lifted and my soul nourished by my time in the garden.  It gave me a calm connection with all of life, and an awareness that
remains with me now, long after leaving the garden."

-  Nancy Ross

 

 

"  'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed.  But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart.  A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and love growing things."
-  Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener, 1962

 

 

"As the biocentric view suggests, the garden prospers when control is balanced by equal measures of humility and benevolence.  A balance is struck.  Control, servitude, respect, imagination, pragmatism, an ecological conscience, compliance, and a certain measure of mysticism and altruism, all meld together to provide nurturance."
-  Jim Nollman, Why We Garden

 

 

"Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps."
-  Amos Bronson Alcott

 

 

"A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction."
-  
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1860

 

 

"Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw." 
-   Henry David Thoreau

 

 

"The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create.  All trade rests at last on his primitive activity.  He stands close to Nature; he
obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

"Each person's idea of a garden is unique.  In creating a garden, we not only open a door to Nature but to an ideal space, one we can control and order."
-  Marilyn Barrett, Creating Eden

 

 

"A garden is an awful responsibility.  You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it."
-   Charles Dudley Warner

 

 

"We eat light, drink it in through our skins.  With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically.  I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially.  Seeing is a very sensuous act─there's a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something."
-  James Turrell 

 

 

"God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!""
-  Joseph Campbell

 

 

"I did however used to think, you know, in the woods walking, and as a kid playing the the woods, that there was a kind of immanence there─ that woods, a places of that order, had a sense, a kind of presence, that you could feel; that there was something peculiarly, physically present, a feeling of place almost conscious ... like God.  It evoked that."
-  Robert Creely, Robert Creely and the Genius of the American Common Place

 

 

"It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings." 
-  Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel 

 

 

"The secret of beginning a life of deep awareness and sensitivity lies in our willingness to pay attention. Our growth as conscious, awake human beings is marked not so much by grand gestures and visible renunciations as by extending loving attention to the minutest particulars of our lives. Every relationship, every thought, every gesture is blessed with meaning through the wholehearted attention we bring to it. In the complexities of our minds and lives we easily forget the power of attention, yet without attention we live only on the surface of existence. It is just simple attention that allows us truly to listen to the song of a bird, to see deeply the glory of an autumn leaf, to touch the heart of another and be touched. We need to be fully present in order to love a single thing wholeheartedly. We need to be fully awake in this moment if we are to receive and respond to the learning inherent in it."
-  Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield, Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart

 

 

"There is no language of the holy.  The sacred lies in the ordinary."
-  Deng Ming-Dao

 

 

 

 

 

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Spirituality     Simplicity     Weeding     Work     Clichés     Pleasures     Haiku    

Months     Zen     History of Gardening     Time     Walking     Fitness     Grass         

Fruit     Rain     Vegetables     Family     Trees     Flowers     Ecology     Sunshine    

Touching     Seeing     Hearing     Smelling    Tasting     Sensing     Body-Mind    

Beauty     Tranquility     Solitude     Index     Cloud Hands Blog    

 

        

 

 


 

 



 

This webpage was last updated on November 26, 2016.

This webpage was first posted to the Internet in March of 1999.


I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas, Contributions, and Suggestions

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