Earth

Hydrofarm Germination Station with Heat Mat   

American Horticultural Society Plant Propagation: The Fully Illustrated Plant-by-Plant Manual     

Burpee Seed Starter: A Guide to Growing Flower, Vegetable, and Herb Seeds Indoors and Outdoors

Plant Propagator's Bible

The New Seed Starter's Handbook

RION MLT3 Mini Lean-To Greenhouse

Seed Sowing and Saving: Step-by-Step Techniques for Collecting and Growing  

Saving Seeds: The Gardener's Guide to Growing and Storing Vegetable and Flower Seeds

Seed Sowing and Saving: Step-by-Step Techniques for Collecting and Growing More Than 100 Vegetables, Flowers, and Herbs

"I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil.  He is a creature who digs himself into the earth and leaves the sight of what is on it to us gaping good-for-nothings.  He lives buried in the ground.  He builds his monument in a heap of compost.  If he came into the Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say: "Good Lord, what humus!"
-  Karel Capek, The Gardener's Year, 1931

"All clays are pretty well unworkable with ordinary implements.  For the melted toffee consistency of winter, you might prefer a large soup-ladle; for light working over summer, a hammer and cold chisel.  Is the soil always too wet or too dry?   No, there's a period - usually a day or two in May - when you can actually use a fork."
-  John Lucas, Backs to the Garden Wall

"There are fairies at the bottom of our garden."
-  Rose Fyleman

"The earth neither grows old or wears out if it is dunged."
-  Columella, circa 45 A.D.

"Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.  We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children."
-  Ancient Indian Proverb

"Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places."
-  Henry Beston

"To reach a great height a person needs to have great depth."
-  Anonymous

"I conjure you, my brethren, to remain faithful to earth, and do not believe those who speak unto you of superterrestrial hopes!  Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not."
-  Friedrich Nietzsche

"Remain true to the earth."
-  Friedrich Nietzsche

"Nature does have manure and she does have roots as well as blossoms, and you can't hate the manure and blame the roots for not being blossoms."
-  Buckminster Fuller

"When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land."
-  John Stuart Mill, 1806 - 1873

"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock."
-  Thomas Jefferson

"When you throw dirt, you lose ground."
-  Texan proverb

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
-  Thoreau

"No sooner did I bend over and scratch the soil with the hoe that I began to unearth bits and pieces ... of my past.  Memories forever rooted in time were clustered in my garden consciousness like potatoes, waiting, crying to be dug up.  ...  I plant flowers and vegetables.  I harvest memories - and life."
-  Nancy H. Jordan

"I have a rock garden.   Last week three of them died."
-  Richard Diran

"Nature abhors a vacuity
Especially in perpetuity
She finds her felicity
In asymmetricity
And notices no incongruity."
-  Jim Clatfelter

"Nothing can be created out of nothing.
"Nil posse creari De nilo."
-  Lucretius,  99 -  55 B.C.

"Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to
a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
-   Author Unknown

"Seldom do we realize that the world is practically no thicker to us than the print of our footsteps on the path.  Upon that surface we walk and act our comedy of life, and what is beneath is nothing to us.   But it is out from that under-world, from the dead and the unknown, from the cold moist ground, that these green blades have sprung.
-  Richard Jefferies

Gardening at the Dragon's Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated Worlds by Wendy Johnson

The Findhorn Garden: Pioneering a New Vision of Man and Nature in Cooperation by the Findhorn Community

The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning by Julie Messervy 

A Garden's Promise: Spiritual Reflections on Growing from the Heart by Judith Couchman 

The Soul Garden: Creating Garden Spaces for Inner Growth and Spiritual Renewal by Donald Norfork 

The Druidry Handbook: Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth by John Michael Greer

Landscape as Spirit: Creating a Contemplative Garden by Martin Hakubai Mosko

Sacred Circle Garden by Karen and Mike Garofalo

Sacred Gardens by Michel and Judy Marcellot

Spiritual Gardening: Creating Sacred Space Outdoors by Peg Streep

Gardens for the Soul: Designing Outdoor Spaces Using Ancient Symbols and Healing Plants by Pamela Woods 

"I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts.  There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity.  It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds.  It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes.  The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter.   Man is an affair of cities.  His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings.  Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows.  But the giant is there, nevertheless.
-   Wallace Stevens, Letters, p. 73

"There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp."  
-  John Steinbeck

"To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things."
-  Zen Master Dogen

"The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God."
-  Benedict De Spinoza,  1632 - 1677

"God is in the details."
-  Mies Van Der Rohe

"Details are all there are."
-  Maezumi

"You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt."
-  Author Unknown

"There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots. The other is wings."
-  Hodding Carter, Jr.

"The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit - not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic."
-  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"There is a great pleasure in working in the soil, apart from the ownership of it.  The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world."
-  Charles Dudley Warner, 1870

"Gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth."
-  Sir Thomas Browne 

"You are always picking up odd-shaped stones, pebbles and fossils, saying that you do this because it pleases you, but I know better.  Deep inside you there must be an awareness of the rock power, of the spirits in them, otherwise you would not pick them up and fondle them as you do."
-  Lame Deer,  Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions

"Soil . . . scoop up a handful of the magic stuff.   Look at it closely. What wonders it holds as it lies there in your palm.  Tiny sharp grains of sand, little faggots of wood and leaf fiber, infinitely small round pieces of marble, fragments of shell, specks of black carbon, a section of vertebrae from some minute creature.  And mingling with it all the dust of countless generations of plants and flowers, trees, animals and – yes – our own, age-long forgotten forebears, gardeners of long ago.  Can this incredible composition be the common soil?"
-  Stuart Maddox Masters, The Seasons Through 

"An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia."
-  Baron Thomas B. Macaulay,  1800 - 1859

"Winter is the season dominated by bare soil: the whole gardening cycle begins with the care and preparation of the earth during winter so that it will feed plants the following year.  One of the things I enjoy about digging (and there are lots of things I enjoy about it) is the smell of the earth that is released by the spade cutting in and lifting clods that have been buried for a year.  Not only does the soil itself have a real scent, but the roots of the crop or plant - even weed - that has been growing there will also contribute to the mix, creating something new out of the vague remnants of last season's garden."
-  Monty Don, The Sensuous Garden, 1997

"Most of all one discovers that the soil does not stay the same, but, like anything alive, is always changing and telling its own story.   Soil is the substance of transformation."
-   Carol Williams

"Since the history's first epic poem recorded the visit of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh to a special grove of cedars, certain natural spots scattered around the world - Ayers Rock, Mount Fuji, Canyon de Chelly, the springs at Lourdes, the Ganges River, and hundreds of others - have drawn people seeking insight, inspiration, healing or proximity to the divine."
-  Winifred Gallagher, The Power of Place, 1993

"Gardeners Know All The Dirt."
-  Popular Garden Sayings

"All you under the heaven!  Regard heaven as your father, earth as your mother, and all things as your brothers and sisters."
-  Shinto saying

"And all the times I was picking up potatoes, I did have conversations with them.  Too, I did have thinks of all their growing days there in the ground, and all the things they did hear.  Earth-voices are glad voices, and earth-songs come up from the ground through the plants; and in their flowering, and in the days before these days are come, they do tell the earth-songs to the wind ... I have thinks these potatoes growing here did have knowings of star-songs." 
-  Opel Whiteley, 8 years of age, The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow - The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley, Penguin, 1994. 

"If we do not permit the Earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either."
-  Joseph Wood Krutch

"To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug."
-  Helen Keller

"There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country.  It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back."
-  Willa Cather

"from wet clay
where no seed will grow
the worm"
-  Elizabeth St. Jacques

"We're electrical beings living in a magnetic environment.  ...  Because we're finely tuned to subtle energy fields, when they vary, as they would on top of a mountain, we change biologically and psychologically too."
-  Louis Slesin

"Just as a prism of glass miters light and casts a colored braid, a garden sings sweet incantations the human heart strains to hear.  Hiding in every flower, in every leaf, in every twig and bough, are reflections of the God who once walked with us in Eden."
-  Tonia Triebwasser, The Color of Grace 

"Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring."
-  William Alexander, A Father's Book, 1997

"Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.   You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable.  As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to the new striving and suffering.  And not merely "some day."   Now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over."
-  Erwin Schroedinger, My View of the World, 1964, p.21

"No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, no culture comparable to that of the garden ...
But though an old man, I am but a young gardener."
-  Thomas Jefferson, Garden Book, 1811

"The real lowdown on gardening is ... dirt."   
-  Texas Bix Bender

"Talk of mysteries!  Think of our life in Nature - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks.  The solid earth!"
-  Henry David Thoreau

"Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome."
-  Ralph W. Emerson 

"To dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this doubtless is the right way to live."
-  Henry James

"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. 
It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth."
-  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

"In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed of perfection."
-  Walt Whitman, Song of the Universal

"The farther we get away from the land, the greater our insecurity."
-  Henry Ford

"Tread softly!  A signpost in one garden reads: Your feet are killing me!"

"There is always something rough and tumble about planting - because with our clumsy implements we must
reach from our atmospheric element down into another, down into the darkness of the soil."
-  Stanley Crawford

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
- Hannah Arendt

"Consult the Genius of the Place in all."
-  Alexander Pope

"Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up."
-  James A. Garfield

"The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred, the  ganz andere or 'wholly other.'"
-  Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries

"The golden rule of gardening is to pay attention to local conditions of weather and soil." 
-  Carol Williams

"I am open to the accusation that I see compost as an end it itself.  But we do grow some real red damn tomatoes such as you can't get in the stores.  And potatoes, beans, lettuce, collards, onions, squash, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, peppers.  Dirt in you own backyard, producing things you eat.  Makes you wonder."
-  Roy Blount, Jr. 

"To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves."
-  Mahatma Gandhi

"Mountains and rivers at this very moment are the actualization of the world of the ancient Buddhas.  Each, abiding in its phenomenal expression, realizes completeness."
-  Zen Master Dogen

"At the time Gothic cathedrals were designed, most people lived in dark huts, so just walking into a space vastly larger than what they were habituated to, lit by stained glass windows, was literally awe-inspiring.  Today, we're not as impressed by big buildings, so we have to go to very large mountains to experience that 'diminutive effect.'"
-  M. A. Persinger

"Sitting in my garden at midnight staring at the stars can also produce that 'diminutive effect.'"
-  Mike Garofalo

"By the deficiency or absence of one necessary constituent, all the others being present, the soil is rendered barren for all those crops to the life of which that one constituent is indispensable. 
-   Julius von Liebig, German physical soil chemist, Law of the Minimum, 1840

"A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world."
-  George Santayana

"Holy Mother Earth, the trees and all nature, are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds."
-  Winnebago Native American saying

"Spade!  Thou art a tool of honor in my hands.
I press thee, through a yielding soil, with pride."   
-  William Wordsworth

"I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete, 
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken."
-  Walt Whitman, A Song of the Rolling Earth

"When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that
I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For here the religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals shame-faced to hide itself in dim churches, flourishes greatly, filling the soul with a solemn joy.  Face to face with Nature on the vast hills at eventide, who does not feel himself near to the Unseen?"
-  W. H. Hudson, The Purple Land

"Wherever you are is home
And the earth is paradise
Wherever you set your feet is holy land . . .
You don't live off it like a parasite.
You live in it, and it in you,
Or you don't survive.
And that is the only worship of God there is."
-  Wilfred Pelletier and Ted Poole

"I have sat here happy in the gardens,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds....
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones,
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them."
-  Richard Aldington, 1892-1962, Au Vieux Jardin

"What
has happened
makes

the world.
Live
on the edge,

looking."
-  Robert Creeley,  Here

"The word humility (also human) is derived from the Latin humus, meaning "the soil."  Perhaps this is not simply because it entails stooping and returning to earthly origins, but also because, as we are rooted in this earth of everyday life, we find in it all the vitality and fertility unnoticed by people who merely tramp on across the surface,
drawn by distant landscapes."
-  Piero Ferrucci, Inevitable Grace

"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

"Going deeper
And deeper still -
Green Mountains"
-  Santoka

"The Earth Is Our Mother The Earth is our mother, we must take care of her
The Earth is our mother, we must take care of her.
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.
Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take
Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take.
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.
The Sky is our father, we must take care of him
The Sky is our father, we must take care of him
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.
The Rivers are our sisters, we must take care of them
The Rivers are our sisters, we must take care of them.
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.
The Trees are our brothers, we must take care of them
The Trees are our brothers, we must take care of them.
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan,
Hey yana, ho yana, hey yan yan.  
-  Hopi (Native American, Arizona) Chant  Pagan Chant Library

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick  

Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory by Neil Johnson   

The Essence Of Chaos by Edward Lorenz 

Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics by Gary Zukav  

Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity by John Gribbin 

Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven Strogatz 

The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism by Fritjof Capra 

"A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being."
-  Thomas Moore

"Even before I could speak, I remember crawling through blueberry patches in the wild meadows on our hillsides.  I quickly discovered Nature was filled with Spirit; I never saw any separation between Spirit and Nature.  Much later I discovered our culture taught there was supposed to be some kind of separation - that God, Spirit and Nature were supposed to be divided and different.  However, at my early age it seemed absolutely obvious that the church of the Earth was the greatest church of all; that the temple of the forest was the supreme temple.  When I went to the sanctuary of the mountain, I found Earth's natural altar - Great Spirit's real shrine.  Years later I discovered that this path of going into Nature, bonding deeply with it, and seeing Spirit within Nature - God, Goddess, and Great Spirit - was humanity's most ancient, most primordial path of spiritual cultivation and realization."
-  John P. Milton, Sky Above, Earth Below

"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers.  So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin.  Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother.  Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.   If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves."
-  Native American Wisdom

"he land is a mother that never dies." 
-  Maori Proverb

"God does not die on that day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reasoning. ... When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism."
-  Dag Hammarskjold

"I pledge devotion to the earth, our one and only home, and to the life this earth sustains; one nation, one spirit indivisible, with freedom and fulfillment for all."
-  Bruce Hagen, New Pledge of Allegiance, 1983

Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World by Richard Foster  

Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go by Richard Rohr

Enough: Discovering Joy through Simplicity and Generosity by Adam Hamilton 

Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich by Duane Elgin

"Land is the place where lessons are taught, where Wisdom abides; where we learn lessons about life and death from the seed broken open in darkness, dying in order to come to life in a different form, and from the compost which teaches us that decay is needed for life's richness. Land is the place where we are healed when no words can comfort or explain.  It is the place where we are taught about and find community; where everything is connected to everything else, and nothing exists independently; the place where everything feeds on and depends on the other."
-  Jeanne Clark