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"There is no absurdity so
palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin
to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air
of great solemnity."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Native ability without
education is like a tree without fruit.
- Theodore Roosevelt
It can't be broadly true, but every
male gardener I know attributes
the genesis of his interest in gardening to a grandparent. In their
retirement from moneymaking and their quieter, more nurturing
attentions, grandparents might be well suited to this unveiling this,
the happy work of horticulture.
- Michael Fox, My Grandmother and Her Peonies
Apprentice yourself to nature.
Not a day will pass
without her opening a new and wondrous world of
experience to learn from and enjoy.
- Richard W. Langer
Learning is a treasure that will
follow its owner everywhere.
- Chinese Proverb
Gardeners must dance with feedback, play with
results, turn as they learn.
Learning to think as a gardener
is inseparable from the acts of gardening.
Learning how to garden is
learning how to slow down.
Wise is the person whose heart
and mind listen to what Nature says.
Time will tell, but we often fail to listen.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions
Listen to all, plucking a feather
from every passing goose,
but, follow no one absolutely.
Chinese Proverb
Beware of a man of one book.
- English Proverb
If you have a garden and a library,
you have everything you need.
- Cicero
What a blessing it is to love books.
Everybody must love something,
and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and
unfailing returns as books and a garden.
- Elizabeth von Arnim
Will is the root, knowledge is the
stem and leaves,
and feeling is the flower.
- Sterling
T'is education forms the common mind:
Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.
- Alexander Pope, 1688-1744
The essence of education is the education of
the body.
- Benjamin Disraeli
You must not know too much or be too
precise or scientific about
birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin,
and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your
enjoyment of these things.
- Henry David Thoreau
To teach is to learn twice.
- Joseph Joubert
Our ordinary mind always tries to
persuade us that we are nothing
but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger,
fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith
gives us knowledge of something better: that we can
become oak trees.
- E.F. Schumacher
I first read classical and
modern Western and Eastern philosophers when I was fifteen,
and have since considered myself a person with a humanistic, pragmatic, secular,
and
philosophical outlook on most matters. I have been content to use reasoning
and science
to help me solve most of my problems. Like most people, I make room for
mystical,
mythical, poetic, and symbolic viewpoints when dealing with many artistic,
psychological and values issues.
- Mike Garofalo
Compared to gardeners, I think it is
generally agreed
that others understand very little about anything of consequence.
- Henery Mitchell
Must we always teach our children
with books? Let them look
at the stars and the mountains above. Let them look at the waters
and the trees and flowers on Earth. Then they will begin to think,
and to think is the beginning of a real education.
- David Polis
Mastery is not something that strikes
in an instant, like a thunderbolt,
but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.
- John W. Gardner
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know
that things that
are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the
divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
- Wendell Berry
Man's mind, once stretched by a new
idea,
never regains its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Publishing a volume of verse is like
dropping a rose petal
down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
- Don Marquis
When planning for a year, plant corn.
When planning for a decade,
plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.
- Chinese Proverb
Never regard study as a duty, but as
the enviable opportunity to learn to know the
liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and
to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
- Albert Einstein
If a man speaks in a forest and there
is no woman
there to hear him, is he still wrong.
- Author unknown
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
"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
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
- William Wordsworth
Whoever acquires knowledge but does
not practice it is as one
who ploughs but does not sow.
- Saadi
Gardening is something
you learn by doing — and by making mistakes....
Like cooking, gardening is a constant process of experimentation,
repeating the successes and throwing out the failures.
- Carol Stocker
The longer the island of knowledge,
the longer the shoreline of wonder.
- J. Singer
If you want knowledge, you must take
part in the practice
of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear,
you must change the pear by eating it yourself.
- Mao Tse-tung
Gardening is a labour full of tranquility
and satisfaction; natural
and instructive, and as such contributes to the most
serious
contemplation, experience, health and longevity.
- John Evelyn, 1666
God is in the details.
Mies Van Der Rohe
Details are all there are.
- Maezumi
We think in generalities, but we live
in detail.
- Alfred North Whitehead
No amount of genius can overcome a
preoccupation with detail.
- Levy's Eighth Law
The Essence of Gardening - Quotes and Poetry
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only
of complex minds.
- Remy de Gourmant
‘Garden’ came into the
language in the 14th century from Old Northern
French gardin, itself a variation of Old French jardin (still used in
modern
French), which probably has a German origin. ‘Horticulture’ is not
recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary until 1678. This word for the
art or science of cultivating gardens comes from the Latin hortus, meaning
garden, and cultura, meaning growing or cultivation. The 17th century
also saw the creation in American-English of the idea of a ‘backyard’,
first recorded in Suffolk, Mass, in 1659. ‘Yard’, however, is one of
the
oldest words in the English language. It came in around 300 AD as
geard ‘building, home, region’, from a Germanic word that is related
to ‘garden’ and ‘orchard’.
- Juliet New, A Word About Gardening
I am writing in the
garden. To write as one should of a garden
one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it,
but in the garden.
- Frances Hodgson Burnett
Just as the bee takes the nectar and
leaves without damaging the color
or scent of the flowers, so should the sage act in a village.
- Dhammapada, Sayings of the Buddha, Pali Cannon
Knowledge is like a garden: if it is
not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.
- Proverb from Guinea
The more one gardens, the more one
learns; And the more one learns, the
more one realizes how little one knows.
- Vita Sackville-West
I imagine most of that stuff on the
information highway is roadkill anyway.
- John Updike
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly
read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.
- Alexander Pope, 1688-1744
Seeing is different than being
told.
- Proverb from Kenya
Quotes for Gardeners
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Cliches, Adages
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
A word to the wise ain't necessary,
it is the stupid ones who need all the advice.
Bill Cosby
Nature teaches more than she
preaches. There are no sermons in stones.
It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
- John Burroughs
A love of flowers would beget early
rising, industry, habits of close observation, and
of reading. It would incline the mind to notice natural phenomena, and to
reason
upon them. It would occupy the mind with pure thoughts, and inspire a sweet
and gentle enthusiasm; maintain simplicity of taste; and ... unfold in the heart
an enlarged, unstraightened, ardent piety.
- Henry War Beecher
Some books are to be tasted, others
to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested.
- Frances Bacon
Study nature, love
nature, stay close to nature.
It will never fail you.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
Earth and sky, wind and trees, rivers
and fields, the mountains
and the sea. All are excellent schoolmasters and teach some of
us more than we could ever learn from books.
- Author unknown
For the sensory thinker, the world of the
mind bears
a direct physical resemblance to the world outside.
- Robert Sommer
A modest garden contains, for those
who know how to look and to wait,
more instruction than a library.
- Henri Frederic Amiel
You can't learn anything from saguaro
cactus, from ocotillo.
They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded
dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of
permanence. They know even less than you do.
- Barry Lopez
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must
write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
- Frances Hodgson Burnett
I must study politics and war that my
children may have liberty to
study mathematics and philosophy. My children ought to study
mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval
architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to
give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music,
architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
- John Adams, 1767-1848
The whole problem with the world is
that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
- Bertrand Russell
A gardener's best tool
is the knowledge from previous seasons.
And it can be recorded in a $2 notebook.
- Andy Tomolonis
Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think
how opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners
themselves tend to be. Nobody talks much about the muscular
limbs, dark,swollen buds, strip-tease trees and unholy beauty that
have made us all slaves of the Goddess Flora.
- Ketzel Levine's Talking Plants
Always try to grow in your garden some plant or plants out
of
the ordinary, something your neighbors never attempted. For
you can receive no greater flattery than to have a gardener of
equal intelligence stand before your plant and ask,
"What is that?"
- Richardson Wright
He who learns teaches, he who teaches learns.
- African proverb (Thanks Billie!)
Human history becomes more a race
between education and catastrophe.
- H. G. Wells, 1920
My advice to gardeners is to believe what you
see as temporal entertainment; a gift from nature.
Do not pass on your interpretation as gospel. Do not seek interpretation from
others.
- Thomas Clothier, Garden
Walk and Talk
Strew no roses before swine.
- Dutch Proverb
... garden books are quite unconscious that
besides telling us how to turn our patch of earth into a garden, they are also expressing
the way their age looks at the world, the state of their society.
- Nan Fairbrother, Men and Gardens, 1956
In Europe, the word peasant was a
term of contempt used by the nobility, but the Chinese
scholars used to fancy themselves rustics. Agriculture was viewed as a noble
occupation;
buying and selling, by contrast were considered nonproductive. One of the
founders of
the Chinese civilization was said to have been the venerable She Nung, the
"Divine Farmer."
A scholar often affected to be nothing more than an "old farmer" or a
"simple fisherman"
and referred to his elegant villa as "my thatched hut." This
Rosseau-like feeling for the
country life is an important undercurrent in the scholarly tradition.
- Edwin T. Morris
Every decade needs its own manual of
handicraft.
- Liberty Bailey, Manual of Gardening, 1880
To the makying of bookes of gardenyng
there is noe ende.
- Thomas Hyll, 1563
To one who does not know,
a small garden is a forest.
- Proverb from Ethiopia
Of all the flora and fauna on earth, it is
only man that desires or needs rules.
- Thomas Clothier, Garden Walk
and Talk
People are always talking about
tradition, but they forget we have
a tradition of a few hundred years of nonsense and stupidity, that
there is a tradition of idiocy, incompetence and crudity.
- Hugo Demartini
Is it too ingenuous to imagine that
anything can be left to say
about a garden? Garden literature, descriptive, reminiscent, and
technical, has blossomed so profusely among us during the last
decade, that he should be an expert indeed who ventures to add thereto.
- H. G. Dwight, Gardens and Gardening,
Atlantic Monthly, 1912
One country ... one ideology, one system is
not sufficient. It is helpful to have
a variety of different approaches ... We can then make a joint
effort to solve the problems of the whole of humankind.
- Dali Lama
The original Greek meaning of the
word anthology is
a collection or gathering of flowers in bloom.
- Jane Garmey
Nature teaches more than she
preaches.
There are no sermons in stones.
It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
- John Burroughs
You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful.
- Montagu Don
La rama que crece torcida nunca se
endereza.
A branch that grows crooked, or that is crooked from the beginning,
will never straighten out.
If you don't learn right from wrong early on, or if you don't learn
manners when you are young, you will never learn them later.
- Thanks to Bethania Maria
People say that life is the thing,
but I prefer reading.
- L.P. Smith
With the rapid growth of ecocriticism, concisely defined by
Cheryll Glotfelty
as "the study of the relationship between literature and the physical
environment," and with continued public concern over environmental issues,
writings on nature and natural history are of increasing interest to literary
scholars. Garden writing stands in an intriguing relationship to the broader
genre of nature writing. Although garden writers take as their subject "the
physical environment," it is an environment that they are actively working to
change or "cultivate." Garden writing, then, should provide particularly rich
material for the work of ecocriticism, given that it offers unique insights
into the discursive strategies through which human beings describe,
celebrate, defend, and propagate their transformation of nature
through gardening.
- Laurie Aikman, Attending to the Garden
They set great store by their gardens
. . . Their studie and deligence
herein commeth not only of pleasure, but also of a certain strife and
contention . . . concerning the trimming, husbanding, and furnishing
of their gardens; everye man or his owne parte.
- Sir Thomas More
Unto those who turn
the soil-even though it is turned wrong,
and plant the seed, even though it may not be planted exactly
right, comes creeping in a tide of knowledge more wide and
engulfing than any words in books.
- Source Unknown
Knowledge increases in proportion to
its use; that is,
the more we teach the more we learn.
- H. P. Blavatsky, 1831-1891
Tell me and I'll forget. Show
me, and I may not remember.
Involve me, and I'll understand.
- Native American Proverb
Do not believe in anything simply because you
have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and
rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because
it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in
anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed
down for many generations. But after observation and
analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason
and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all,
then accept it and live up to it.
- Buddha
Spirituality - Quotes for Gardeners
Among gardeners, enthusiasm and
experience rarely exist
in equal measures. The beginner dreams of home-grown bouquets
and baskets of ripe fruit, the veteran of many seasons has learned
to expect slugs, mildew, and frost.
- Roger Swain
Be open to all teachers
And all teachings,
And listen with your heart.
- Ram Dass
Man is a strange animal, he doesn't
like to read the handwriting
on the wall until his back is up against it.
- Adlai Stevenson
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
If not ignored, nature will cultivate
in the gardener a sense of
well-being and peace. The gardener may find deeper meaning
in life by paying attention to the parables of the garden. Nature
teaches quiet lessons to the gardener who chooses
to live within the paradigm of the garden.
- Norman H. Hansen, The Worth of Gardening
Soon enough, however, even the veteran net
surfer grows tired of speed thrills and choppy
surfaces. The tide is already turning toward
information design with greater depth, sense
of place, and the quiet grace of painting and literature.
As the look and feel of the new
media finds its own niche in cultural life, designers will want to expand information
systems
to include virtual worlds that draw on the soothing, contemplative aspects of pre-digital
media.
Technological thrills will cloy until we can inject some of the meditative profundity of
the
Victorian novel or the landscapes of Corot into the Internet.
- Michael Heim, Virtual Reality and the Tea
Ceremony, 1998
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity and the Simple Life
Pulling
Onions
Quips and Observations by Michael P. Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Clichés for Gardeners and Farmers
The
History of Gardening Timeline
From
Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Clichés, 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
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
Education - Quotes for Gardeners. Version
4.7
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong