Flowers - Quotes, Poems and Links for Gardeners

In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death.
Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden
we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
- May Sarton

Brave old-flowers! Wall-flowers, Gilly flowers, Stocks! For even
as the field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of
perfume, divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the
language; and each of them, like tiny, art-less ex-votos, or like medals
bestowed by the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four.
- Maurice Maeterlinck, Old-Fashioned Flowers, 1907

Flowers never emit so sweet and strong a fragrance as before
a storm. When a storm approaches thee, be as fragrant
as a sweet-smelling flower.
- Jean Paul Richter

Should I pluck it,
My hands
Would defile the flower;
I offer it, as it stands,
To the Buddhas of the Three Worlds.
- Empress Komyo, Japan

Still - in a way - nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven't the time -
and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
- Georgia O'Keeffe

I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing
what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment
by moment, of naked existence.
- Aldous Huxley

Isn't it odd that flowers are the reproductive organs of the plants they grow on?
- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Old time is still a-flying
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
- Robert Herrick

Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years
by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole.
- Mark Twain

Am I accurately reporting what I see in such a blossom?
The answer is no ... and yes.
- Allen Lacy, The Gardener's Eye, 1992, p.23

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Quotes for Gardeners

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

The best rose-bush, after all, is not that which has the fewest thorns,
but that which bears the finest roses.
- Henry Van Dyke

Christianity sees plants and flowers as created by God to show
forth and share with humans the divine goodness, beauty and truth -
the purpose of all Creation. In this flowers may be enjoyed simply
and directly in themselves as showing forth God's goodness and
beauty, or, more fully, as archetypes, signatures, symbols, and
bearers of legends, mirroring the revealed articles of Christian
faith - thereby serving as means for their teaching, recollection,
contemplation and celebration.
- John S. Stokes, Jr., Flower Theology II

Under the green hedges, after the snow,
There do the dear little violets grow;
Hiding their modest and beautiful heads
Under the hawthorn in soft mossy beds.

Sweet as the roses and blue as the sky,
Down there do the dear little violets lie;
Hiding their heads where they scarce may be seen,
By the leaves you may know where the violet hath been.
- John Moultrie, Violets

The actual flower is the plant's highest fulfillment,
and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county
floras and plant geography: they are here first
of all for delight.
- John Ruskin

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are
the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
- Marcel Proust

Plum blossoms soften
a stone wall, give warmth to the moon.
Flower power.
- Black Feather

The only Zen you'll find flowering in the garden
is the Zen you bring there each day.
Graveyards and landscape gardens, coffins and flowers - fitting friends.
Enamored of these flowers, certainly - butterflies, bees and me.
Fruits, nuts, grains ... sex and food. Flowers ... sex and beauty.
Flowers do not grow on the map of your garden.
A flower needs roots; beauty of society of minds.
Even the fruitless will sometimes flower.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions

Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go;
it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow.
- Alice M. Swaim

As I work among my flowers, I find myself talking to them, reasoning
and remonstrating with them, and adoring them as if they were human
beings. Much laughter I provoke among my friends by so doing, but that
is of no consequence. We are on such good terms, my flowers and I.
- Celia Thaxter, 1835-1894

I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words,
half in signs, a question which meant "Is love the
sweetness of flowers?
- Helen Keller

I know that for me,
to whom flowers are part of desire,
there are tears waiting for me
in the petals of some rose.
- Oscar Wilde

                For thirty years I have been in search of the swordsman;
                Many a time have I watched the leaves decay
                           and the branches shoot!
                Ever since I saw for once the peaches in bloom,
                Not a shadow of doubt do I cherish.

                            -   Ling-Yün and the Peach Blossoms
                                       D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, 1953, 2nd Series, p. 145,

Life is like a rose . . . More exquisite and precious,
When shared with others.
- Jane Oechsle Lauer

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

Although every flower may possess, secondarily, its own specific
symbolism, for all that, flowers generally are symbols of the passive
principle. The calix of a flower, like the chalice, is the receptacle
of heavenly instrumentality, among the symbols of which dew and
rain should be mentioned. Furthermore, the way flowers grow up
out of earth and water symbolizes manifestation rising out of these
passive elements. ... The allegorical use of flowers is endless.
- Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, 1969

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint
a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses
that were ever painted.
- Henri Matisse

While Rikko, a high government official of the T'ang dynasty, had a talk
with his Zen master Nansen, the official quoted a saying of Sojo, a noted
monk-scholar of an earlier dynasty:

Heaven and earth and I are of the same root
The ten-thousand things and I are of the one substance,

and continued, "Is not this a most remarkable statement?" Nansen called
the attention of the visitor to the flowering plant in the garden and said,
"People of the world look at these flowers as if they were in a dream."

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet
in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Give and Take...
For to the bee a flower is a fountain if life
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love
And to both, bee and flower,
the giving and the receiving is a need and an ecstasy.
- Kahlil Gibran

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made
and forgot to put a soul to.
- Henry Ward Beckford (1759-1844)

But pleasures are like poppies spread -
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed.
- Robert Burns

Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen
anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
- Annie Dillard

Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Iris

I'll remember this day forever -
Our festival of flowers.
Those short moments in our lifetime
When we were one with nature.

Just two of us, hand in hand,
Spending a few precious hours
The sun rose high above us,
In our festival of flowers.
- Pete Seeger

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers,
looks around for a coffin.
- Henry L. Mencken

Flowers are beautiful hieroglyphics of nature, with which she
indicates how much she loves us.
- Wolfgang von Goethe

Texture and foliage keep a garden interesting through the season.
Flowers are just moments of gratification.
- Kevin Doyle

Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful;
they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.
- Luther Burbank

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
- Sigmund Freud

The delicate droop of the petals standing out in relief,
is like the eyelid of a child.
- Auguste Rodin

The Rose is gowned in petaled grace and lovely beyond telling;
She always lifts a friendly face, regardless of her dwelling.
Her golden silence can express to us, no matter where, joy shared;
Give solace in distress from those who fondly care.
The Rose has ways of saying things we much delight to hear;
without a spoken word, she brings and keeps our loved ones near.
- Laura S. Beck

The temple bell stops
but I still hear the sound
coming out of the flowers.
- Basho, 1680

A gift of flowers to a woman implies that she is as deliciously
desirable as the blossoms themselves; but there may be another
and hidden message, contained in the old-fashioned phrases like
'shy as a violet, 'clinging vine,' not originally conceived as
pejoratives, that tells more of the truth - which is that
flowers are also emblems of feminine submission.
- Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts, 1981

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in
written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels,
loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though
few can decypher even fragments of their meaning.
- Lydia M. Child, Letters from New York, 1843

Like the musician, the painter, the poet, and the rest, the true
lover of flowers is born, not made. And he is born to happiness
in this vale of tears, to a certain amount of the purest joy that
earth can giver her children, joy that is tranquil, innocent,
uplifting, unfailing.
- Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden, 1894

Cavalier and foreign bred,
Quite a catch but never wed,
Monsieur Lilac looks astute,
Tall and regal in his suit.
He bereaves me of all words,
Matters not, quite how absurd,
In his bowtie and silk cape
Of respectful, deepest grape ...
Pervading me like a musk,
Possessing me dawn 'til dusk."
- Susan Crowe, French Lilac

What more delightsome than an infinite varietie of sweet
smelling flowers? decking with sundry colours the greene
mantle of the Earth, the universall Mother of us all, so by
them bespotted, so dyed, that all the world cannot sample
them, and wherein it is more fit to admire the Dyer, than
imitate his workemanship. Colouring not onely the earth,
but decking the ayre, and sweetning every breath and spirit.
- William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, 1618

White ... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining
and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black ...
God paints in many colours; but He never paints so
gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when
He paints in white.
- G. K. Chesterton

I want real flowers, perennials which not only grow and change
and die, but also rise again and astonish me. A garden shouldn't
just bloom and look pretty; it should develop like the rest of life.
Otherwise it, and we, live only to be spaded under.
- Emma L. Roth-Schwartz

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
- Walt Whitman

For most of us who are intimidated by theories of garden design,
the cottage garden provides immediate appeal, since it is a
horticultural rather than an architectural solution to a limited area.
- Patricia Thorpe

... the most fiendish plant I know of, the sort of thing Beelzebub might pluck
to make a bouquet for his mother-in-law ... it looks as if it had been made
out of a sow's ear for the spathe, and the tail of a rat that died of Elephantiasis
for the spadix. The whole thing is mingling of unwholesome greens, livid
purples, and pallid pinks, the livery of putrescence in fact, and it possesses
and odour to match the colouring.
- E. A. Bowles, My Garden in Spring, 1914
Speaking about the Dracunculus vulgaris, syn. Arum Dracunculus (Dragon Arum)

You love the roses--so do I. I wish the sky would rain down
roses, as they rain from off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white and soft to tread on.
They would fall as light as feathers, smelling sweet: and it would
be like sleeping and yet waking, all at once.
- George Eliot

The fairest things have fleetest end,
Their scent survives their close:
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose.
- Francis Thompson, 1859-1907

If all our eyes had the clarity of apples
In a world as altered
As if by the wood betony
And all kinds of basil were the only rulers of the land
It would be good to be together
Both under and above the ground
To be sane as the madwort,
Ripe as corn, safe as sage,
Various as dusty miller and hens & chickens,
In politics as kindly fierce and dragonlike as tarragon,
Revolutionary as the lily.
- Bernadette Mayer, The Garden

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.
- Beverley Nichols

When Shakyamuni Buddha was at Mount Grdhrakuta, he held up a flower to his listeners.
Everyone was silent. Only Mahakashyapa broke into a broad smile. The Buddha said,
"I have the True Dharma Eye, the Marvelous Mind of Nirvana, the True Form of the Formless,
and the Subtle Dharma Gate, independent of words and transmitted beyond doctrine.
This I have entrusted to Mahakashyapa."
- The Mumonkan, Zen Koans, Case 6

Flowers have a mysterious and subtle influence upon the feelings,
not unlike some strains of music.   They relax the tenseness of
the mind. They dissolve its vigor.
-   Henry Ward Beecher

As a flower that is lovely,
Colourful, and fragrant
Even so fruitful is the well-spoken word
Of one who practises it.

As from a heap of flowers
Many kinds of garlands can be made,
So many good deeds should be done
By one born a mortal.

The perfume of flower blows not against the wind,
Nor does the fragrance of sandal-wood, tagara and jasmine,
But the fragrance of the virtuous blows against the wind.
The virtuous man pervades all directions.
- Buddhist Sutra

Leaping from the Ledge of Infinite Regress,
The Unmoved Mover fell into Formlessness:
Pure silence echoed between the galaxies,
Eons of eons vanished in a second,
Withered trees bloomed in fires,
Polar mountains melted, rivers went dry,
Thusness scattered in sixty directions,
Space became Time, time became things,
Black Holes filled with Nirvana,
A billion samadhi mirrors shattered,
Galaxies snuggled within a single skull,
Many became One, One only, only One.
Then, the Divine Illuminatrix in All Beings
Opened Her clouded Eye, to see:
Flowers in the Sky.

- Michael P. Garofalo, Emptiness in Full Bloom

An angel, legend has it, took pity on a little shepherd girl who had
nothing to give to the Infant Jesus in his manger. The angel handed
her a weed, but first transformed it into this beautiful flower of winter.
[- the Christmas rose, Helleborus niger.]
- Allen Lacy, The Gardener's Eye, 1991, p. 14

What a desolate place would be a world without flowers. It would be a face
without a smile; a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars
of the earth? Are not our stars the flowers of heaven?
- Clara L. Balfour

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

How could such sweet and wholesome hours be reckoned,
but in herbs and flowers?
- Andrew Marvell

"Compare the silent rose of the sun
And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell,
With this paper, this dust.
That states the point."
- Wallace Stevens

"The way in which the peony is considered as the active source of the measuring of
itself is not merely good psychology, but shows us how Issa looks upon the plant
world and upon himself. Compared to that of the ordinary man, human beings
and plants are much closer together in the thought-feeling world of Issa. The
flower stands there in its color and glory. It does not bloom to be seen, nor
does it wish to blush unseen. It is not dependent upon man, but neither is it
independent of him. Its purposeless purpose is fulfilled in its blooming in
solitude and silence, yet when no one is gazing upon it, it has no shape or color
or fragrance. The flower needs the mind, and the mind needs the flower for its
fulfillment. Issa emphasizes the power and activity of the peony not only because
we live in an egocentric, homocentric world, valueless and unpoetical, but also
because he wishes to bring out the special nature of the peony, its power and
magnificence, its lofty splendor. Is this splendor in the flower? Does Issa
cause the flower to be measured, or does the flower cause Issa to measure it?"
- R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3, Summer-Autumn

Bread feeds the body indeed, but the flowers also feed the soul.
- The Koran

When you have only two pennies left in the world,
buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
- Chinese proverb

The lily was created on the third day, early in the morning
when the Almighty was especially full of good ideas.
- Michael Jefferson-Brown

As a plant produces its flower,
so the psyche creates its symbols.
- Carl G. Yung

Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if
they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really
quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and
weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them.
- Victoria Glendinning

Just as the bee takes the nectar and leaves without damaging the color
or scent of the flowers, so should the sage act in a village.
- Dhammapada, Sayings of the Buddha, Pali Cannon

A fairy seed I planted, so dry and white and old, there sprang a vine
enchanted, with magic flowers of gold.
- Marjorie Barrows

How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers?
- Andrew Marvel

Every rose is an autograph from the hand of God on his world about us.
He has inscribed his thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which
sense and science have, these many thousand years,
been seeking to understand.
- Theodore Parker

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin;
yet I tell you,
even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
- Bible, Matthew, 6:28-29

There is material enough in a single flower
for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.
- John Ruskin

So plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
- Author Unknown

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

To Nature the dweller in the Nile valley linked all that
was dear to him: his happiest fetes, poetry, and love -
all were bound up with the garden and its products,
especially flowers. Few Oriental nations can think of
a festival without flowers, but nowhere are they so
completely a part of human life, and so essential,
as in [Ancient] Egypt.
- M. L. Gothein, A History of Garden Art, 1928

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
         crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
         and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
         a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
         soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sun-
         rays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
         wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
         from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
         fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
         my soul, I loved you then!
-   Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
- Thomas Gray

The love of flowers is really the best teacher
of how to grow and understand them.
- Max Schling

The largest single flower is the Rafflesia or "corpse flower". They are
generally 3 feet in diameter with the record being 42 inches.

No species of wild plant produces a flower or blossom that is
absolutely black, and so far, none has been developed artificially.
- Plants and Botany Trivia

To see the world in a grain of sand
and heaven in a wildflower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour.
- William Blake

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose,
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose,
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose,
You, of course, are a rose -
But were always a rose.
- Robert Frost, 1875-1963

When at last I took the time to look into the heart
of a flower, it opened up a whole new world; a world
where every country walk would be an adventure,
where every garden would become an enchanted one.
- Princess Grace of Monaco

'Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone:
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
- Sir Thomas Moore

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones;
they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them.
There is simply the rose. It is perfect in every moment of its existence.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
- William Blake

What a pity flowers can utter no sound!—A singing rose,
a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle ...
oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be!
- Henry Ward Beecher

The grape Hyacinth is the favorite spring flower of my garden - but no! I though
a minute ago the Scilla was! and what place has the Violet? the Flower de Luce?
I cannot decide, but this I know - it is some blue flower.
- Alice Morse Earle

To win the trophy of enchanting grace:
Ranks of Carnations, to all ladies dear,
Of whose sweet taste I write approval here,
For these pre-eminent myself I think,
As long as you don't overdue the pink.
- Ruth Pitter, 1897-1992, Other People's Glasshouses, 1941

Just living is not enough ...
One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
- Hans Christian Anderson

Through primrose tufts,
in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
- William Wordsworth

The flower that follows the sun does so even on cloudy days.
- Robert Leighton (1611-1684)

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be
mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
- Iris Murdoch

God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.
- James Matthew Barrie, (1860-1937)

Tis better to buy a small bouquet
And give to your friend this very day,
Than a bushel of roses white and red
To lay on his coffin after he’s dead.
- Irish Proverbs

And these memories and associations that our flowers give us are independent
of seasons or of age. They come to us as well in autumn and winter, in spring
and summer; and as to age, the older we get the more, from the very
nature of things, do these memories increase and multiply.
- Canon Ellacombe, In a Gloucestershire Garden, 1895

Give me artificial flowers - porcelain and metal glories - neither
fading nor decaying, forms unaging.
Flowers of the splendid gardens of another place,
where Forms and Styles and Knowledge dwell.
I love flowers made of glass or gold,
true Art's true gifts,
their painted hues more beautiful than nature's,
worked in nacre and enamel,
with perfect leaves and branches.
- K. P. Kavafis, Artificial Flowers, 1903
Translated by Peter J. King and Andrea Christofidou

In last night's storm the beautiful blossoms all fell off. Ah! What a shame.
When it rains for two or three days, again the weeds have grown up. Oh, well.
Zen Master Hakuun Yasutani, 1885 - 1973;
Flowers Fall, 1996, Translated by Paul Jaffe

The Kingdom of Flowering Plants holds a special compassion
for human travail. Because of this, the essences of flowers support
us with a special compassion through our earthbound transformation.
Flower essences contain the vibratory qualities of the flowers,
and are made by infusing the flower into spring water
under sun or moon light.
- Flowers of the Soul

The Chrysanthemum, the Flower of Happiness, was so revered that in Japan
only the nobles could grow it. It has been grown for over 2,000 years all
throughout in the Far East. It has come to mean love and truthfulness.
We may see it carved on the throne of the Emperor of Japan
and on many Chinese artifacts.
- Flowers: Myths, Legends and Traditions

Some lives, like evening primroses, blossom most
beautifully in the evening of life.

brilliant yellow
border of daffodils
behind barbed wire
- Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings

And over one more set of hills, along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of
sweetness and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life I would want to spend it all
on some unstinting happiness.
- Mary Oliver, Roses, Late Summer

Another thing much too commonly seen, is an aberration of the human mind which
otherwise I should have been ashamed to warn you of. It is technically called
carpet-gardening. Need I explain it further? I had rather not, for when I think of
it, even when I am quite alone, I blush with shame at the thought.
- William Morris, Hope and Fears for Art, 1860

The foxglove, with it's stately bells
Of purple, shall adorn thy dells.
- D. M. Moir, The Birth of the Flowers

O frost bitten blossoms,
That are unfolding your wings
From out the envious black branches.
Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine.
The twigs conspire against you!
Hear them!
They hold you from behind.

- William Carlos Williams, Aux Imagistes, 1914

Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better
if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is
really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding,
and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them.
- Victoria Glendinning, Green Words, 1986

Won't you come into my garden?
I would like my roses to see you.
- Richard Sheridan

And why worry about clothes? Look how the wild flowers grow:
they do not worry or make clothes for themselves. But I tell you
that not even King Solomon with all his wealth had clothes
as beautiful as one of these flowers.
- Bible, Matthew 6: 28, 29, &30

I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over
my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it
is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error.
- Sara Stein, My Weeds, 1988

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers
and never succeeding.
- Marc Chagall

I haven't much time to be fond of anything . . . But when I have a moment's
fondness to bestow, most times . . . the roses get it.
- William Wilkie Collins

The original Greek meaning of the word anthology is
a collection or gathering of flowers in bloom.
- Jane Garmey

One day when I was young, and walking with a friend, a field dry
as straw bloomed with flowers. "Oh, glory!" we breathed, my good
friend and I, for the flowers blazed like suns and fire and rainbows.
They sprang from folds between hillsides, peeked from pockets of
shade. Spiraling - dancing - they followed us home...
- Maggie Streincrohn Davis, Glory! To the Flowers

A garden of roses is a fragrant piece of heaven.
A garden without roses is a sorry thing.
- Matthew A. R. Bassity

The Art of Arranging Silk Flowers. By Emilio Robba. Text by Mimi Luebbermann. Photographs by
Louis Gaillard. New York, William Morrow and Co., 1998. Index, 128 pages. ISBN: 0688148409.
Available from the Amazon.Com Bookstore.

The Complete Language of Flowers: A Treasury of Verse and Prose. By Sheila Pickles.
Trafalgar Square Press, 1998. Illustrated Edition. ISBN: 1862051542.
Order this book from the Amazon.Com bookstore.

Kootenay Flowers Gardens in Kootenay County, British Columbia. Webpages arranged by
months. Many lovely photographs and excellent quotes.

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

Flowers II

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

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Quotes ... Links ... References

Flowers II

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

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Quotes ... Links ... References

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