Grass and Lawns

Quotes for Gardeners, Farmers,
and Lovers of the Green Way

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Quotes Links References

There's one good thing about snow, it makes your lawn
look as nice as your neighbor's.
- Clyde Moore

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the
journey-work of the stars.
- Walt Whitman

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so
called scientific knowledge.
- Thomas Edison

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Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass."
- Author Unknown, Desiderata

All flesh is grass.
- Isaiah 40:6

Her lawn
looks like a meadow,
And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne's Lace.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grasses fall ...
- Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678, The Mower to the Glow-Worms

Good millet is known at the harvest.
- Proverb from Kenya

I am the mown grass, dying at your feet,
The pale grass, gasping faintly in the sun.
I shall be dead, long, long ere day is done,
That you may say: "The air, to-day, was sweet."
I am the mown grass, dying at your feet.
- Margaret Gilman Davidson, Moritura

Grains - Quotes for Gardeners

The moment one gives close attention to anything,
even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome,
indescribably magnificent world in itself.
- Henry Miller

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
- The Gospel According To Zen

If you scatter thorns, don't go barefoot.
- Italian proverb

Grass is the cheapest plant to install
and the most expensive to maintain.
- Pat Howell

Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin.
Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was
dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the
grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is
thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you,
O you of little faith!
- Bible: Luke 12:27-

Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill, Laughed in the sun,
and kissed the lovely grass.
- Rupert Brooke

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence,
but you still have to mow it.
- Anonymous

I always thought a yard was three feet,
then I started mowing the lawn.
- C.E. Cowman

On average, 50%-70% of summer household water
is used outdoors for watering lawns and gardens.

Grass is the forgiveness of nature - her constant benediction.
Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish,
but grass is immortal.
- Brian Ingalls

... mow the lawn perfectly, but neglect to make the bed? It's pure, unadulterated logic.
Everyone can see the yard - nobody can see the bed. The lawn is the canvas upon
which guys judge each other. It's the great redeemer.
If we aren't great lawn men, we're nothing.
- Kevin Kerwin, 47 Husband Mysteries Solved.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work.
I am the grass. I cover all.
- Carl Sandburg

Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every
bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling
verdure of a velvet surface.
- Washington Irving

Consider the many special delights a lawn affords: soft mattress for a creeping baby;
worm hatchery for a robin; croquet or badminton court; baseball diamond; restful
green perspectives leading the eye to a background of flower beds, shrubs, or hedge;
green shadows - "This lawn, a carpet all alive/With shadows flung from leaves' - as
changing and as spellbinding as the waves of the sea, whether flecked with sunlight
under trees of light foliage, like elm and locust, or deep, dark, solid shade,
moving slowly as the tide, under maple and oak. This carpet!
- Katharine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, 1979

A people without history is like wind on the buffalo grass.
- Sioux proverb

I don't mow lawns for the reason that I don't shave.
- Kevin Solway

Every blade of grass has it's Angel that bends over it
and whispers, 'grow, grow.'
- Talmud.

A U.S. Solider stationed in Iraq tends his "lawn."

Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere;
My humble song of praise
Most joyfully I raise To Him at whose command
I beautify the land,
Creeping, silently creeping everywhere.
- Sarah Roberts Boyle, The Voice of the Grass

There was a young lady of Leeds
Who swallowed six packets of seeds
In a month, silly lass
She was covered in grass
And she couldn't sit down for the weeds!

A Song of the good green grass!
A song no more of the city streets;
A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields.
A song with the smell of sun-dried hay,
where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork;
A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.
- Walt Whitman

God Bless the grass
That grows through the crack
They roll the concrete over it
To try and keep it back
The concrete gets tired
Of what it has to do
It breaks and it buckles
And the grass grows through.
God bless the grass

- Malvina Reynolds (1900-1978)
From her song God Bless the Grass

In creating, the only hard thing's to begin;
a grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak.
- James Russell Lowell

Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't
exist in a lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower
and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death.
No wonder Americans like them so much.
- Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are
usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical
consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass
in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows
alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown
to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many
other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called
Dark Ages. According the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the
decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the
Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not
need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter
for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen
for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations
to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay
moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and
Moscow and New York.
- Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, p. 135