What is a weed? I have heard it
said that there are sixty definitions.
For me, a weed is a plant out of place.
- Donald Culross Peattie
Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we
stoop than when we soar.
- William Wordsworth, 1798
My idea of gardening is to discover
something wild
in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care
until it has a chance to grow and spread.
- Margaret Bourke-White
Our England is a garden, and such
gardens are not made
By singing 'Oh how wonderful' and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out, and start their working lives
By grubbing weeds from garden paths with broken dinner knives.
- Rudyard Kipling
More grows in the garden than the gardener
sows.
-
Spanish proverb
A weed is but an unloved flower.
- Ella Wilcox, 1855 - 1919
The unmulched garden looks to me like some
naked thing
which for one reason or another would be better off
with a few clothes on.
- Ruth Stout
You fight dandelions all weekend, and
late Monday afternoon there they
are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be,
thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.
- Hal Borland
If you are a garden plant you are
regarded;
well regarded, just as long as you stay in the garden.
- Davies Gilbert
A weed is a plant that is not only in the wrong place,
but intends to
stay.
- Sara Stein
Everyone has enough weeding to do in
their own garden
Flemish proverb
I consider every plant hardy until I
have killed it myself.
- Sir Peter Smithers
A flowering weed;
Hearing its name,
I
looked anew at it.
- Teiji
Only God can make a tree, but I'm in
charge of seeds and weeds!
- Author Unknown
A flower is an educated weed.
- Luther Burbank
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not
yet been discovered.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878.
What a diversity of creative wanderers:
Weeds. I enjoy their beauty and variety, and do nothing to reap their
rewards. I neither hoe, nor plant, nor water, nor fertilize, nor prune ... and they
come and go in lovely
profusion as the seasons move. Often a pleasure, sometimes a pain in the wrong
place; and always
an example of the wondrous assertion of Being.
- Mike Garofalo
Crabgrass can grow on bowling balls in
airless rooms, and there is no known way
to kill it that does not involve nuclear weapons.
- Dave Barry
One of the truest of gardening sayings is that you have to be cruel to be
kind.
If things are left to go overgrow, they look out of shape, scale and control.
- Brian Davis
I always think of my sins when I weed.
They grow
apace in the same way
and are harder still to get rid of.
- Helena Rutherfurd Ely, A Woman's Hardy Garden, 1903
Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make
haste.
- William Shakespeare
I do not scorn weeds. As a
matter of fact, there are some instances where they
are necessary for the garden. The question of propriety is decided by the
dialogue between man and weed.
- Shimpei Kusano
"People who spend a great deal of time in their
gardens attest to the natural mindfulness that gardening requires.
What could be more naturally mindful than weeding? It requires a great deal of
sustained attention.
Weeds need to be taken up with care: Pull too hard, and the weed breaks in your
fingers, leaving the root to grow and spread.
Different weeds need different techniques and, sometimes, tools. When we weed
our gardens, we have to pay attention to where and how we walk and bend.
Move too far in one direction or another, and we'll squash growing things."
- Sura Lama Das, "Awakening to the Sacred"
Gardening is a kind of disease.
It infects you, you cannot escape it.
When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the
serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.
- Lewis Gannit
A garden is a symbol of man's arrogance,
perverting nature to human ends ...
- Tim Smit, The Lost Gardens of Heligan
The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his
field to weed it, the prayer of the rower
kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
They know, they just know where to
grow, how to dupe you, and how
to camouflage
themselves among the perfectly respectable plants, they
just know, and therefore,
I've concluded weeds must have brains."
- Dianne Benson, Dirt, 1994, p. 128
Weeds are flowers too,
once you get to know them
- A. A. Milne, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 3,300 Quotes, Arranged by 140 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
If you are not killing plants, you
are not really stretching yourself as a gardener.
- J. C. Raulston
When I have the time to take a walk, I would often take the
time to admire
the grass. Grass doesn't make a fuss. It doesn't try to be
beautiful or
outstanding. It doesn't want to attract attention. It is so humble that
it
even allows people to walk all over it. Yet, it possess such strength.
It glows in healthy green despite being stepped all over, and when a
typhoon strikes and all the flowers die and all the trees get uprooted,
humble grass survives. And humble grass, in its own humble way,
provides food for animals, shelter for insects, and joy to some funny
guy walking past. I think a virtuous man should be like grass.
Humble, unnoticed, yet possessing great strength and kindness.
- Tan Chade Meng
Free Weeds
U Pick 'Em
Weeds don't need planting in
well-drained soil; they don't ask for
fertilizer or bits of rag to scare away the birds. They come without
invitation; and they don't take the hint when you want them to go.
Weeds are nobody's guests: More like squatters.
- Norman Nicholson.
A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival
skill
except for learning how to grow in rows.
- Doug Larson
Man is by definition the first and
primary weed
under whose influence all other weeds have evolved.
- Jack R. Harland
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to
me
- Thomas Jefferson
My basic weeding rule: if they grow
in rows they're flowers;
if they don't they're weeds.
- David Hobson, The
Mad Gardener
And you thought you
had a big weeding job ahead?
Mike Garofalo weeding a slope of ivy in 1983 in Hacienda Heights, California.
If dandelions were hard to grow, they
would be most welcome on any lawn.
- Andrew V. Mason
Weeds are really Perennial`s that hav`en Educated yet!
"We can in fact only define a
weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known
definition of dirt - as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely
a plant growing where we do not want it."
- E. J. Salisbury, The Living Garden, 1935
Weed 'um and reap!
On no other ground
Can I sow my seed
Without tearing up
Some stinking weed.
- William Blake
For Zen students, a weed is a
treasure.
- Shunryu Suzuki
The true gardener then
brushes over the ground with slow and
gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite;
but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is
only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices
with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to
pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns
into a Reformer.
- Freya Stark
Brushed, they erupt in poison, invisible, adamant as
unrequited
love; but should you, in rage and pain, crush the offending branch,
the blood of nettle will surely heal you, just as, scalded, the
spiteful shoots turn tame and nourishing.
- Gwen Head, Stinging Nettle
Weeds grasp their own essence and
express its truth.
- Santoka, Diary, 8/19/40
Nothing is as interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the
outdoor work, and
at last had to confine myself to the house,
or literature must have gone by the
board.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
One year to seed; seven to weed.
Weeds and Their Similarity to Sin (From the Garden of Weeden)
Weeds are Like People: We may be different
but you gotta dig us.
- Lyndsay
I guess a good gardener always starts as
a good weeder.
- Amos Pettingill
If I wanted an easy care garden, I would have planted weeds.
... the actual cultivation of
root crops began with the weeding out of less
useful plants from natural communities to allow more room for the desired
plants. This was followed by the realization that the crop "roots"
could be
planted and would thrive in comparable habitats not already containing
them if these, too, were weeded.
- H. G. Baker, Plants and Civilization, 1978
That's Roman wormwood - that's pigweed -
that's sorrel -
that's piper-grass - have at him, chop him up, turn his roots
upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if
you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as
a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with
weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on
their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue
armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling
up the trenches with weed dead. May a lusty crest-waving
Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding
comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
Plant and your spouse plants with
you; weed and you weed alone.
- Dennis Breeze
We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to
remove
the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace
and abundance may
manifest for all.
- Dorothy Day
Give a weed an inch and it will
take a yard.
- Author Unknown
A man of words and not deeds,
Is like a garden full of weeds.
- Nursery rhyme
Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marred by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
- Theodore Roethke, 1908 - 1963, Long Live the Weeds
A person's character and their garden
both reflect the amount of weeding
that was done during the growing season.
- Author Unknown
Their names I know not,
But to every weed its flower,
And loveliness.
- Sampu
If a person cannot love a plant after
he has pruned it, then he has either
done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.
- Liberty Hyde Bailey
Perennials are the ones that grow like weeds,
biennials are the ones
that die this year instead of next and hardy annuals are
the ones that
never come up at all.
- Katherine Whitehorn
I would rather see one happy plant of
knotweed than
half a dozen aristocratic individuals struggling unsuccessfully.
- Marguerite James
The indignity of it!-
With everything blooming above me,
Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,
Whole fields lovely and inviolate,-
Me down in the fetor of weeds,
Crawling on all fours,
Alive, in a slippery grave."
- Theodore Roethke, Weed Puller, 1948
Hoeing: A manual method of severing
roots from stems
of newly planted flowers and vegetables.
- Henry Beard
My garden is a
balancing act between weeds and wonders.
Though I started out as a frustrated perfectionist, over the
years I've learned how to enjoy my garden rather than feel
enslaved by it, thanks to a growing know-how and a
change in mindset.
- Carol Stocker
Gardens can be sharp and spiky as
well as rose-embowered
and honeysuckle-twined: there are corners and settings
where thistles are not such an asinine taste after all.
- Robin Lane Fox, Thoughts on Thistles, 1986
But make no mistake: the weeds will
win: nature bats last.
- Robert M. Pyle
The true gardener then brushes over
the ground with slow and gentle
hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not
thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur
like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure
in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost
forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.
- Freya Stark, Perseus in the Wind
weeds and wildflowers
in widower’s garden
no green thumb, no more
- Victor P. Gendrano
The philosopher who said that work
well done never needs doing over
never weeded a garden.
- Ray D. Everson
A weed is no more than a flower in
disguise.
- James Russell Lowell, The Growth of a Legend,
1847
Before falling to the scythe
the weeds
enjoy a little breeze.
- Peter Levitt, 100 Butterflies
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the headbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O Let them be left, wildness and wet:
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889, Inversnaid
To rid the grass of weed, to get
The whole root,
Thick, tangled, takes a strong mind
And desire -- to make clean, make pure.
The weed, tough
As the rock it leaps against,
Unless plucked to the last
Live fiber
Will plunge up through dark again.
The weed also has the desire
To make clean,
Make pure, there against the rock.
- Lucien Stryk, 1924- , Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu
And Still Birds Sing, 1998, p. 44
The Moon, the dried weeds
and the Pleiades -
Seven feet tall
the dark, dried weedstalks
make a part of the night
a red lace
on the milky blue sky
- William Carlos Williams, In This Strong Light
All gardens, even the most native and
naturalistic, benefit
from the hand of an artful pruner. In this season where the
garden is poised for the green flood of springtime, remember
that our gardens are co-creations, shared with mother earth.
And like any good mother, she expects you to tidy up
your room. Now get clipping!
- Tom Spencer, Soul of
the Garden
Weeds are the little vices that beset
plant life, and
are to be got rid of the best way we know how.
- Farmer's Almanac, 1881
It is not enough for a gardener to
love flowers;
he must also hate weeds.
- Anonymous
Man is by definition the first and
primary weed.
Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.
- Michael Pollan, Weeds Are Us
Even though flowers fall, don't
regret it. Even though weeds grow,
don't hate them. Don't arouse the passions of attraction and repulsion,
hating and loving. If only we don't arouse the passions, the falling of flowers
and the growing of weeds as they are is manifest absolute reality.
Zen Master Hakuun Yasutani, 1885 - 1973;
Flowers Fall, 1996, Translated by Paul Jaffe
The only two herbicides we recommend are
cultivation and mulching.
- Organic Gardening
I'm dirty, tired, sore, and my face is
red;
and, every damn weed in that garden is dead.
Gardening is a kind of deadheading -
keeping us from going to seed.
Weeds multiply in direct proportion to your
efforts to eliminate them.
Weed when wet - weeds thrive; weed when dry -
weeds die.
Left to themselves, weeds
tend to go from there to everywhere.
The oak and bindweed grow in the same soil;
seeds
and scissors go back into the same shed.
Your hand hoe will always find its way to the
bottom of the weeding barrel.
Pulling weeds can also clear the mind.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions
Removing the weeds, putting fresh
soil about the bean
stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown,
making the yellow soil express its summer thought in
bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood
and piper and millet grass, making the earth say
beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work ....
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
Oh, hardy flower, disdained as weed,
Despised for head of feathery seed,
Your unsung virtues rate a ballad,
Choice roots for wine, crisp leaves for salad.
- Betty Gay, Dandelion
Weeds -
lengthen
with the days.
- Issa, Translated
by Lucien Stryk
Roots of the weed sucked first life
from the genesis of earth
and hold the essence of it still. Always the weed returns;
the cultured plant retreats before it.
- Beryl Markham, West with the Night, 1942
As one grows older one
should grow more expert at finding beauty
in unexpected places, in deserts and even in towns,
in ordinary human faces and among wild weeds.
- C.C.Vyvyan
My garden slumbers in the winter, peaceful, quiet,
weedfree.
It's tranquil in this setting, no weeds to be seen.
But comes the spring with its warmth and flowers delight
then the weeds poke out their ugly head, what a nightmarish site.
I pull, I scream, they reappear.
My husband says "Didn't we just do this last year, dear? "
My endless battle, it seems, I'm doomed not to win.
Is shooting your weeds considered a sin?
- Christine Blanksvard, My Garden Slumbers
July 2001 Winner of the Ergonica Weed Poetry Contest
"I recall as a young child bringing bouquets of brilliant yellow flowers to my mother. It didn't matter that the stems felt sticky or that both my parents cursed the presence of these flowers in the lawn. I thought they were beautiful!
And there were so many of them! We spent hours picking the flowers and then popping the blossoms off with a snap of our fingers. But the supply of dandelions never ran out. My father or brothers would chop off all the heads with the lawn mower at least once a week, but that didn't stop these hardy wonders.
And for those flowers that escaped the honor of being hand delivered to my mother, the horror of a childish sing-song game of "Mama had a baby and its head popped off" or the sharp blades of the lawn mower, there was another level of existence.
The soft, round puffs of a dandelion gone to seed caused endless giggles and squeals of delight as we unwittingly spread this flower across the yard.
As I worked in my garden last week, pulling unwanted weeds out of the space that would become a haven for tomatoes, corn, peas and sunflowers, I again marveled at the flower that some call a weed. And I thought, "If only I had the staying power of a dandelion."
If only I could stretch my roots so deep and straight that something tugging on my stem couldn't separate me completely from the source that feeds me life. If only I could come back to face the world with a bright, sunshiny face after someone has run me over with a lawnmower or worse, purposely attacked me in an attempt to destroy me. If only my foliage was a nutritious source of vitamins that help others grow. If only I could spread love and encouragement as freely and fully as this flower spreads seeds of itself.
The lawns at my parents' home are now beautiful green blankets. The only patches of color come from well-placed, well-controlled flowerbeds. Chemicals have managed to kill what human persistence couldn't.
I hope you and I can be different. I hope that we can
stretch our roots deep enough that the strongest poison can't reach our
souls. I hope that we can overcome the poisons of anger, fear, hate,
criticism and competitiveness. I hope that we can see flowers in a world
that sees weeds."
- Donna Doyon, Lessons from a Dandelion
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity
and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions
Quips, Maxims and Observations by Michael P.
Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 3,400 Quotes, Arranged by 140 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas, Contributions, and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Weeds and Weeding - Quotes for Gardeners.
Version 8.1
Cuttings by Michael P. Garofalo
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong
Valley Spirit Journal by Michael P. Garofalo
Pulling Onions by Michael P. Garofalo
Valley Spirit Photography Gallery