Quotes For Gardeners

Sunset, Evening, Night,
Moon, Stars

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

From the Spirit of Gardening Website

Night has a thousand eyes.
- John Lyly, 1554 - 1606

When stars are in the quiet skies,
Then most I pine for thee;
Bend on me, then, thy tender eyes,
As stars look on the sea.
- Baron E. G. Bulwer-Lytton, 1803 - 1873

And from the phlox and mignonette
Rich attars drift on every hand;
And when star-vestured twilight comes
The pale moths weave a saraband.
And crickets in the aisles of grass
With their clear fifing pierce the hush;
And somewhere you many hear anear
The passion of the hermit thrush.
- Clinton Scollard, A Midsummer Garden

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Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O, abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day;
Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou, who changest not, abide with me.
- Henry Francis Lyte, 1793 - 1847

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
- George Meredith, 1828 - 1909

The plum tree, dwindling, contains less of the spring;
But the garden is wider, and holds more of the moon.
- Zen Saying, Soul of the Garden

The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon
of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the
moon that looks down upon the resorts of summer time.
Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus,
it waxes night after night.
- Donald Culross Peattie

The dews of summer night did fall,
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silver'd the walls of Cumnor Hall,
And many an oak that grew nearby.
- William J. Mickle, 1735 - 1788

The flowers that keep
                 Their odor to themselves all day;
                  But when the sunlight dies away,
         Let the delicious secret out
                    To every breeze that roams about.
              -    Anonymous

I don't know what you could say about a day in
which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.
- John Glenn

A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
- Amy Lowell, The Garden by Moonlight

Our limitations serve, our wounds serve,
even our darkness can serve.
- Rachel Naomi Remen

Not till the fire is dying in the grate,
Look we for any kinship with the stars.
- George Meredith, 1828 - 1909

Houses -
the dark side silhouetted
on flashes of moonlight!
- William Carlos Williams, Night

       All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
                              All night has the casement jessamine stirred
          To the dancers dancing in tune;
                     Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
             And a hush with the setting moon.
                         -    Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
- Anonymous

At dusk
Come to my hut -
The crickets will
Serenade you, and I will
Introduce you to the moonlit woods.
- Ryokan, Taigu, 1758-1831

It is always darkest before it gets pitch black.

Morning - Quotes for Gardeners

Plants that wake when others sleep. Timid jasmine buds that keep
their fragrance to themselves all day, but when the sunlight dies
away let the delicious secret out to every breeze that roams about.
- Thomas Moore

Colours change; in the morning light, red shines out bright and clear
and the blues merge into their surroundings, melting into the greens;
but by evening the reds loose their piquancy, embracing a quieter tone
and shifting toward the blues in the rainbow. Yellow flowers remain
bright, and white ones become luminous, shining like ghostly figures
against a darkening green background.
- Rosemary Verey, The Scented Garden, 1981

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
- Charles A. Beard

This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,
And Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.
- Mrs. Barbauld. 1743-1825, A Summer's Evening Meditation.

no gate
to go through
nightfall

- Michael McClintock

Just as the moon only reflects its light in a pool,
So the mind, empty and unattached,
Does not know itself and the outside world
As two things.
- The Gospel According To Zen

It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences
when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so
many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering
how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such
a sky. This too is a question that would only occur to the
young, to the very young; but may God make you
wonder like that as often as possible!
- Dostoevsky, White Nights

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable
it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Evening

          All through the deep blue night
The fountain sang alone;
     It sang to the drowsy heart
      of the satyr carved in stone.

     The fountain sang and sang
     But the satyr never stirred--
   Only the great white moon
     In the empty heaven heard.
                              -    Sara Teasdale, The Fountain

We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was marked
off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue,
others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed
all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and
the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke
them, as one would the sleek back of a cat.
- Mark Twain

          How much more beautiful is the moon,
          Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree;
          The moon
          Wavering across a bed of tulips;
          The moon,
          Still,
          Upon your face.
          You shine, Beloved,
          You and the moon.
          But which is the reflection?
                               - Amy Lowell, Interlude

It is a good idea to be alone in a garden at dawn
or dark so that all it's shy presences may haunt
you and possess you in a reverie
of suspended thought.
- James Douglas

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."
- Vincent Van Gogh

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"A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
and closed them beneath the kisses of night."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, 1820

Weather - Quotes for Gardeners

"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act
without benefit of experience."
- Henry Miller

"So we down-to-earth, gutsy, tough, realistic, and practical types have just
been squandering billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of energy,
nerve-work, and materials in whizzing off to the moon to discover, as
astronomers knew before, that it was just a dreary slag heap. This is
the true, original and scientifically etymological meaning of being
lunatics. Crying for the moon."
- Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, 1968.