Quotes For Gardeners

Spring in the Garden

April    May    June

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

From the Spirit of Gardening Website

Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear
that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments,
not the composer.
-  Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

When the April wind wakes the call for the soil, I hold the plough
as my only hold upon the earth, and, as I follow through the fresh
and fragrant furrow, I am planted with every foot-step, growing,
budding, blooming into a spirit of spring.
-   Dallas Lore Sharp, 1870-1929

It is dry, hazy June weather.  We are more of the earth,
farther from  heaven these days.
-  Henry David Thoreau

No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.
-  Proverb from Guinea

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.
-  James R. Lowell,  1819 - 1891

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.  
The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.
-  Henry Van Dyke, Fisherman's Luck, 1899

The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts
of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full
of red dust.  The air one breathed was saturated with
earthy smells, and the grass under foot
had a reflection of the blue sky in it.
-   Willa Cather

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.
-   William Wordsworth

I think that no matter how old or infirm I may become,
I will always plant a large garden in the spring.  Who can
resist the feelings of hope and joy that one gets from
participating in nature's rebirth?
-   Edward Giobbi

May and June.  Soft syllables, gentle names for the two best months
in the garden year:  cool, misty mornings gently burned away with a
warming spring sun, followed by breezy afternoons and chilly nights.
The discussion of philosophy is over; it's time for work to begin.
-   Peter Loewer

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; 
to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the 
stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring — these 
are some of the rewards of the simple life. 
–  John Burroughs

Summer - Quotes for Gardeners

Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.
-  Doug Larson

I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose
I would always greet it in a garden.
-   Ruth Stout

If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an
earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold
the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men
only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous and the perpetual exercise of God's power
seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be.
-   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sweetly breathing , vernal air,
That with kind warmth doth repair
Winter's ruins; from whose breast
All the gums and spice of the East
Borrow their perfumes; whose eye
Gilds the morn, and clears the sky.
-  Thomas Carew,  1595 - 1645

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
- The Gospel According To Zen

In the scenery of spring,
nothing is better, nothing worse;
The flowering branches are
of themselves, some short, some long.
-   Ryokan

Happiness?  The color of it must be spring green, impossible to describe
until I see a just-hatched lizard sunning on a stone.  That color, the
glowing green lizard skin, repeats in every new leaf.   ...  The
regenerative power of nature explodes in every weed, stalk, branch. 
Working in the mild sun, I feel the green fuse of my body, too.  Surges
of energy, kaleidoscopic sunlight through the leaves, the soft breeze
that makes me want to say the word "zephyr" - this mindless
simplicity can be called happiness.
-   Frances, Mayes, Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, 1999

When the time is ripe for certain things, these things
appear in different places in the manner of violets
coming to light in the early spring.
-   Farkas Bolyai

April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
-  William Shakespeare

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
-  T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

Only in dreams of spring
Shall I ever see again
The flowering of my cherry trees.
-   Frances Hodgson Burnett

Mine is the time of foliage,
When hills and valleys teem
With buds and vines sweet scented,
All clothed in glowing green.

My nights are bright and starry,
My days are long and clear
And truly I'm the fairest,
Of all months in the year.
-  Mary Fordham, June

So Spring comes merry towards me here, but earns
No answering smile from me, whose life is twin'd
With the dead boughs that winter still must bind,
And whom today the Spring no more concerns.

Behold, this crocus is a withering flame;
This snowdrop, snow; this apple-blossom's part
To breed the fruit that breeds the serpent's art.
Nay, for these Spring-flowers, turn thy face from them,
Nor stay till on the year's last lily-stem
The white cup shrivels round the golden heart.
-  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Barren Spring, 1870

Science has never drummed up quite as effective
a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.
-   W. Earl Hall

One week later ...
Six Directions of Green
Billions of leaf-buds
-  Mike Garofalo, Cuttings

The country habit has me by the heart,
For he's bewitched forever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun.
-  Vita Sackville-West

April  -  Quotes and Poems

Again rejoicing Nature sees
Her robe assume its vernal hues
Her leafy locks wave in the breeze,
All freshly steep'd in the morning dews.
-   Robert Burns

It is one of the first days of Spring, and I sit once more in the old garden
where I hear no faintest echo of the obscene rumbling of London streets
which are yet so little away.  Here the only movement I am conscious of
is that of the trees shooting forth their first sprays of bright green, and
of the tulips expanding the radiant beauty of their flaming globes, and the
only sound I hear is the blackbird's song -- the liquid softly gurgling notes
that seem to well up spontaneously from an infinite joy, an infinite peace,
at the heart of nature and bring a message not from some remote Heaven 
of the Sky or Future, but the Heaven that is Here, beneath our feet, even
beneath the exquisite texture of our own skins, the joy, the peace, at
the Heart of the Mystery which is Man.  For man alone can hear the 
Revelation that lies in the blackbird's song.
-   Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, 1918

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier
in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.
-   Nadine Stair

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

April    May    June

The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world!
-   Robert Browning

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. 
No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
-  Aldo Leopold

Autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
- Elizabeth Bowen

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon-

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of thing that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be ...
-   Wallace Stevens, The Motive for Metaphor

May  -  Quotes and Poems

Hoe while it is spring, and enjoy the best anticipations.  
It is not much matter if things do not turn out well.
-  Charles Dudley Warner

The tree is stripped,
All color, fragrance gone,
Yet already on the bough,
Uncaring spring!
-  Ikkyu, Zen Poems of China and Japan, Lucien Stryk, p. 135

Summer makes me drowsy,
Autumn makes me sing,
Winter’s pretty lousy,
but I hate Spring.
-  Dorothy Parker

Spring shows what God can do
with a drab and dirty world.
-   Virgil A. Kraft

Will it always be like this until I am dead, 
Every spring must I bear it all again 
With the first red haze of the budding maple boughs, 
And the first sweet-smelling rain? 
Oh I am like a rock in the rising river 
Where the flooded water breaks with a low call -- 
Like a rock that knows the cry of the waters 
And cannot answer at all.
-   Sara, Spring Torrents

Certain miracles that I beheld there have haunted my memory
ever since: a gray April morning of sirocco, when the almond
blossoms, the flaming tulips, the young green of the vines, hung
as if painted on the motionless air; a summer night when the
roses had an unearthly pallor under a half-eaten moon, whose
ghostliness was somehow one with their perfume and with the
phosphorescence of dew tipping their petals; a day when the
trees stood part submerged in fog, into which leaves dropped
slowly, slowly, one after another, and sank out of sight.
-   H. G. Dwight, Gardens and Gardening, Atlantic Monthly, 1912

The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's kiss glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze.
-  Julian Grenfell

The oak tree:
not interested
in cherry blossoms.
- Basho

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
-   Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon

From all these trees,
in the salads, the soup, everywhere,
cherry blossoms fall.
-  Basho

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.
-  Robert Frost

A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly.
-   Rhyme from England

Sun, my relative
Be good coming out
Do something good for us.
Make me work.
I can do anything in the garden;
I hoe, I plant corn, I irrigate.
-   Havasupai prayer

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair
and let us huddle together as darkness takes over
We are at home amidst the birds and the trees,
for we are children of nature.
-  Susan Polis Shutz

Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
-   Victor Hugo

Winter - Quotes for Gardeners

On this June day the buds in my garden are almost as enchanting as
the open flowers. Things in bud bring, in the heat of a June noontide, the
recollection of the loveliest days of the year - those days of May when all
is suggested, nothing yet fulfilled.
-  Francis King

The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to
Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.
-   Bill Veeck

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough.
-   A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896

To the garden of the world anew descending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,
amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons, most wondrous,
Existing I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present, content with the past,
By my side or back of me Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.

-  Walt Whitman, To the Garden of the World

Every spring is the only spring - a perpetual astonishment.
-   Ellis Peters

Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men.
-   Chinese Proverb

Spring has come,
Loudly sing cuckoo !
Groweth seed and blooms
mead
And springs the wood now.
Sing cuckoo !
-  English Poetry from the Middle Ages

April    May    June

That God once loved a garden we learn in Holy writ.
And seeing gardens in the Spring I well can credit it.
- Winifred Mary Letts

Spring slattern of seasons
you have soggy legs
and a muddy petticoat
drowsy

is your hair your
eyes are sticky with
dream and you have a sloppy body from

being brought to bed of crocuses
when you sing in your whisky voice
the grass rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge

spring
of the excellent jostle of
thy hips
and the superior

-  E. E. Cummings, Spring Onmipotent Goddess Thou

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should
have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.
-   Henry David Thoreau

The thorn tree just began to bud
And greening stained the sheltering hedge,
An many a violet beside the wood
Peeped blue between the withered sedge;
The sun gleamed warm the bank beside,
'Twas pleasant wandering out a while
Neath nestling bush to lonely hide,
Or bend a musings o'er a stile.
-  John Clare, 1840

The spring is fresh and fearless
And every leaf is new,
The world is brimmed with moonlight,
The lilac brimmed with dew.

Here in the moving shadows
I catch my breath and sing --
My heart is fresh and fearless
And over-brimmed with spring.
-   Sara Teasdale, May Night, 1920

Spring makes everything look filthy.
-   Katherine Whitehorn

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices 
instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable 
shrieking into the heart of the night.  
-   Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

The sun is on fire
In the sky
And in its warmth
Flowers open
In the garden
And the butterfly
Flutters by.
-  Stanley Cook

Now every field is clothed with grass, and every tree with leaves;
now the woods put forth their blossoms, and the year assumes its gay attire.
-  Virgil

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come
and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise my love, my fair one,
and come away.
- The Song of Solomon, 2:11-13

Walking around
               an early spring garden--
going nowhere.
-   Kyoshi

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, 
a box where sweets compacted lie.
- George Herbert

         And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
                 Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
       And over it softly her warm ear lays.
       -   James Russell Lowell

Every year back spring comes, with nasty little birds,
yapping their fool heads off and the ground all
mucked up with plants.
-   Dorothy Parker

But each spring a gardening instinct, sure as the sap rising in the trees,
stirs within us. We look about and decide to tame another little bit of ground.
-  Lewis Gantt

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese,
cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
-   Aldo Leopold

Quotes for Gardeners

Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Cliches, 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

This outward spring and garden are a reflection of the inward garden.
-  Rumi

There is nothing like the first hot days of spring when the gardener stops
wondering if it's too soon to plant the dahlias and starts wondering if it's
too late. Even the most beautiful weather will not allay the gardener's notion
(well-founded actually) that he is somehow too late, too soon, or that he
has too much stuff going on or not enough. For the garden is the stage on
which the gardener exults and agonizes out every crest and chasm of the heart.
- Henry Mitchell, 1923 - 1993, The Essential Earthman, p. 17

Now is the time of the illuminated woods ...
when every leaf glows like a tiny lamp.
-   J. Burroughs

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers:
Of April, May, or June, and July flowers.
I sing of Maypoles, Hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of the bridal cakes.
-   Robert Herrick, Hesperides, 1648

You can't see Canada across lake Erie, but you know it's there.
It's the same with spring.  You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland.
-   Paul Fleischman, Seedfolks

I don't know what smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought back
my childhood with a rush and all the happy days I had spent in a
garden.  Shall I ever forget that day?  It was the beginning of my
real life, my coming of age as it were, and entering into my kingdom.
Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth; leafless and
sad and lonely enough out there in the damp and silence, yet there I
stood feeling the same rapture of pure delight in the first breath of
spring that I used to as a child, and the five wasted years fell from
me like a cloak, and the world was full of hope, and I vowed myself
then and there to nature and have been happy ever since.
-   Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth & Her German Garden, 1898

Seasons - Quotes for Gardeners

What potent blood hath modest May.
-  Ralph W. Emerson,  1803 - 1882

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state
of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
-  George Santayana

O the green things growing the green things growing,
The fair sweet smell of the green things growing.
-   Dinah Mulock Craik

The world's favorite season is the spring. 
All things seem possible in May.
-   Edwin Way Teale

O Day after day we can't help growing older.
Year after year spring can't help seeming younger.
Come let's enjoy our winecup today,
Nor pity the flowers fallen.
-   Wang Wei, On Parting with Spring

Break open
A cherry tree
And there are no flowers,
But the spring breeze
Brings forth myriad blossoms.
-  Ikkyu Sojun, 1394-1481

Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil.
-  Reginald Heber

The afternoon is bright,
with spring in the air,
a mild March afternoon,
with the breath of April stirring,
I am alone in the quiet patio
looking for some old untried illusion -
some shadow on the whiteness of the wall
some memory asleep
on the stone rim of the fountain,
perhaps in the air
the light swish of some trailing gown.
-   Antonio Machado, 1875-1939
    Selected Poems, # 3, Translated by Alan S. Trueblood

                       Ahh, the wide almond groves in full white flower
                       Stunning in the morning sun.
                       Old naked Winter in his garb of grays and browns has run.
                       Forsythia blooms come and go in the blink of a yellow Eye,
                       Then, suddenly, mysteriously, Green erupts; and we sigh.
                                            -   Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings

Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo

One flower does not bring spring.
A good year is determined by its spring.
-  Afghan proverbs

April    May    June

Spring - An experience in immortality.
-   Henry D. Thoreau

Swiftly the years, beyond recall,
Solemn the stillness of this fair morning,
I will clothe myself in spring-clothing,
And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill,
By the mountain-stream a mist hovers,
Hovers a moment, then scatters,
There comes a wind blowing from the south
That brushes the fields of new corn.
-  Chinese poem, Author Unknown, Translated by Arthur Waley

Now every field is clothed with grass, and every tree with leaves;
Now the woods put forth their blossoms, and the year assumes it's gay attire. 
-   Virgil

March in the garden -
my hostess shows me brown sticks
and speaks of flowers
-   Sister Benedicta

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon
only when it is cloudless?  To long for the moon while looking on
the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of
the spring - these are even more deeply moving.  Branches
about to blossom or gardens strewn with flowers are
worthier of our admiration.
-   Yoshida Kenko

Earth is dry to the center,
But spring, a new comer,
A spring rich and strange,
Shall make the winds blow
Round and round,
Thro' and thro' ,
Here and there,
Till the air
And the ground
Shall be fill'd with life anew.
-   Alfred Tennyson, Nothing Will Die

The month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth
to blossom, and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees 
bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in likewise every lusty heart
that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty
deeds.  For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month 
of May.  
-   Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur, 1485

My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms - 
will it return to my body when they scatter?
-   Kotomichi

March 20st.  Marks the 1st day of true spring.  The Goddess blankets
the Earth with fertility, bursting forth from Her sleep, as the God stretches
and grows to maturity.  He walks the greening fields and delights in the
abundance of Nature.  This is a time of beginnings, of action, of planting
spells for future gains, and of tending ritual gardens.
-   Ostara/Spring Equinox,   Catala Silver Moon

Sprigs of plum by the corner of the wall
Are blooming alone in the cold;
If not for the subtle fragrance drifting over
Who could tell this from snow on the boughs.
-   Wang Anshi, Plum Blossom, 1060

                                          Dropped off
                                                           body and mind -
                                                           weeding new cuttings.
                                                                                   -  Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings

Drenching the pavement,
warming the wall,
bathing the cat
in a slumbering sprawl ...

Waking the buds
that break from the tree.
Shaking out gold,
and all for free.
-  Tony Mitton, Spring Sunshine

Spring would not be spring without bird songs.
-   Francis M. Chapman

Reaching for the heart
of spring--
wind from tree to tree.
-   Aro (1879-1951)

daylight and darkness
Spring
balanced
-  Mike Garofalo, Cuttings

And Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast
rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
-  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, 1820

                       Plum blossoms:
            My Spring
             Is Ecstasy.
                -   Issa

First a howling blizzard woke us,
Then the rain came down to soak us,
And now before the eye can focus -
Crocus.
-   Lilja Rogers

When the hounds of Spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.
-   Swinburne

Jacaranda blue
crowns treetops in roadside show--
Springtime anew
-  Victor Gendrano, Haiku and Senryu Harvests

The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. 
Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about 
fifteen miles a day.  It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a 
hundred feet a day.  It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing 
down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most 
of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the 
stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring.  Each 
year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around 
us, goes flooding away to the north.
-   Edwin Way Teale, North With the Spring

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trails its wreath;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure;
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

-   William Wordsworth, Lines Written in Early Spring

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

Walking on willow tree roads by a river dappled
with peach blossoms,
I look for spring light, but am everywhere lost.
Birds fly up and scatter floating catkins.
A ponderous wave of flowers sags the branches.
-  Wang Wei, 699-761
Going to the Country in the Spring

Sweet April showers
Do spring May flowers.
-   Thomas Tusser, A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry, 1557