“Garden as though you will live forever.”
– William Kent
“There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.”
– Alfred Austin
“I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens. I can not bear gardening, but I love gardens.”
– Elton John
“I love decorating my home. I’m a gardener too, so that’s usually something I have to play catch up with.”
– Suzy Bogguss
“If you build up the soil with organic material, the plants will do just fine.”
– John Harrison
“Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.”
– Dogen Zenji
“If a tree dies, plant another in its place.”
– Carolus Linnaeus
“The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.”
– Michael Pollan
“Use plants to bring life.”
– Douglas Wilson
“It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.”
– B. C. Forbes
“What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.”
– Charles Dudley Warner
“When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.”
– Robert Smithson
“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
“To dwell is to garden.”
– Martin Heidegger
“All gardening is landscape painting.”
– William Kent
“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
“I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation.”
– Phyllis Theroux
“Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.”
– Marcelene Cox
“How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.”
– Alexander Smith
“If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.”
– Luther Burbank
“Gardening is not a rational act.”
– Margaret Atwood
“Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.”
– May Sarton
“The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.”
– Luther Burbank
“Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path.”
– Jean Anouilh
“Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colors.”
– Oscar de la Renta
“Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.”
– Alfred Austin
“My neighbour asked if he could use my lawnmower and I told him of course he could, so long as he didn’t take it out of my garden.”
– Eric Morecambe
“A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant – rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance – but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.”
– Roberto Burle Marx
“A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness it teaches industry and thrift above all it teaches entire trust.”
– Gertrude Jekyll
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
– May Sarton