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, 1890
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
There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.- John Ruskin 1851
My Garden is a confusion of kitchen and parterre, orchard and flower garden, which lie so mixt and interwoven with one another, that if a foreigner, who had seen nothing of our country, should be conveyed into my garden at his first landing, he would look upon it as a natural wilderness, and one of the uncultivated parts of our country.
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
- Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me. - Thomas Jefferson, 1790
" This is June, the month of grass and leaves . . . already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomena is reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. " - Henry David Thoreau, June 6, 1857
"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, The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, 1971
"I love being asked to identify plants, and I don't know which gives me more pleasure: to know what they are or not to know what they are."
...Elizabeth Lawrence, Through the Garden Gates, 1990
"The best is yet to be."...Robert Browning
"The only two herbicides we recommend are cultivation and mulching."...Organic Gardening Magazine
"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
"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."...Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg (1986)
"Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow."
"The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world."...Vita Sackville-West
"I'm not aging, I just need repotting."...Anonymous
"The best fertilizer for a piece of land is the footprints of its owner."...Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973)
"Gardening is not a rational act."
...Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg (1986)
"I want death to find me planting my cabbages."...Montaigne, Essays Book I (1880)
"I was determined to know beans."...Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
"What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it."...Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden (1871)
"Growing in the fast lane."...Unknown
"From the ground up."...Unknown
"If you want to be happy for a short time, get drunk;
happy for a long time, fall in love;
happy forever, take up gardening."
...British comedian and playwright Arthur Smith
"There is a fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."...Dave Barry
"If there is magic on this planet it is contained in water."...Loren Eiseley
"It takes a long time to grow old friends."...Anonymous
"Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of
God."...Thomas Jefferson
"Hope for the future is at the heart of all gardening."*
"You know you are a real gardener when you think compost is a fascinating subject."*
"Plants that are about to be removed have a habit of suddenly doing better."*
"Nature soon takes over if the gardener is absent."*
"Gardening is a mirror of the heart."
"How lovely is the silence of growing things."
"You hosta have 'em."
"He who owns a wood of proper land in this country, and, in the face of all the personal riches of the day, only raises crabs and choke pears, deserves to lose the respect of all sensible men."
...A.J. Downing "Fruits & Fruit Trees of America" 1845
"When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden."...Minnie Aumonier
"The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession."...Phyllis McGinley
"Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."...Henry David Thoreau
"And puck 'til time
and times are done,
The silver apples of the moor,
The golden apples of the sun."
...William Butler Yeates
"Nothing is more the child of art than a garden."
...Sir Walter Scott
"Carpe rutila" (Seize the spade)
..David Hobson
"A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul."...Sadi
"Kiss of the sun for pardon.
Song of the birds for mirth.
You're closer to God's heart in a garden
Than any place else on earth."
...Dorothy Frances Gurney
"Nothing is worth more than this day."...Mary Engelbreit
"Bloom where you are planted."...Mary Engelbreit
"What is paradise, but, a garden, an orchard of trees and herbs, full of pleasure and nothing there but delights."...William Lawson from the book "The Country Housewife's Garden" (1617) This was the first garden book written expressly for women.
"I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden."...John Erskine
"What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."...Ralph Waldo Emerson 1878
"Gardening is the purest of human pleasures."
...Francis Bacon
"I thank you for the seeds...Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity."
..Thomas Jefferson, 1822
"Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor's."...Mary Cantwell
"One can never have enough clay pots."
"Friends are flowers in the garden of life" .... Anon
"The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world" ...Vita Sackville-West
"There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments."
..Janet Kilburn Phillips
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