"Whether you tend a garden or not, you
are the gardener of your own being,
the seed of your destiny."
- The Findhorn Community
"The love of gardening is a seed that once
sown never dies."
- Gertrude Jekyll
"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
"Only God can make a tree, but I'm in
charge of seeds and weeds!"
- Author Unknown
"Find the seed at the bottom of your
heart and bring forth a flower."
- Shigenori Kameoka
Happiness held is the seed; Happiness shared is the flower.
O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.
- John Davies, 1570-1626, Ode to the West Wind.
"I don't
believe the half I hear,
Nor the quarter of what I see!
But I have one faith, sublime and true,
That nothing can shake or slay;
Each spring I firmly believe anew
All the seed catalogues say!"
- Carolyn Wells
One for the rock, one for the crow,
One to die, and one to grow.
- English saying
One for blackbird, one for the crow,
One for the cutworm, and one to grow.
- American saying
A good gardener always plants 3 seeds
-
one for the bugs, one for the weather and one for himself.
- Leo Aikman
The anthropologists are busy, indeed,
and ready to transport
us back into the savage forest where all human things … have
their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.
- Edith Hamilton
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it,--
The small water seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
- Theodore Roethke, Cuttings
You're supposed to get tired planting
bulbs. But it's an agreeable tiredness.
- Gail Goodwin
The seed has no idea
of being some particular plant, but it has
its own form and is in perfect harmony with the ground, with
its surroundings ... and there is no trouble. This is what we
mean by naturalness.
- Shrunyu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
More grows in the garden than the
gardener sows.
- Spanish Proverb
Many things grow in the
garden that were never sown there.
- Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
Before the seed there comes the
thought of bloom.
- E. B. White
dry seeds scatter
from my hand into the wind
one clings
as if to say there is in me
something yet to be
- Jeanne Emrich, Haiga Online
The seed is hope; the flower is joy.
- Author Unknown
Don't judge each day by the harvest
you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
All the flowers of all the tomorrows
are in the seeds of today.
- Author Unknown
Two years ago, I was saying as I
planted seeds in the garden,
"I must believe in these seeds, that they fall into the earth and
grow into flowers and radishes and beans." It is a miracle to
me because I do not understand it. The very fact that they use
glib technical phrases does not make it any less a miracle, and
a miracle we all accept. Then why not accept God's miracles?
- Dorothy Day, From Union Square to Rome, 1938
I once found a kernel of corn in the
middle of a deep wood
by Walden, tucked in behind a lichen on a pine, about as high
as my head, either by a crow or a squirrel. It was a mile
at least from any corn-field.
- Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, November 19, 1850
I ask not for a larger garden,
but for finer seeds.
- Russell H.Conwell
There is a way to see
inside
By looking directly through
to seed or marrow
Within the bone vessel
a world is made
Red and milkweed
it flows between us like
wind
Within the seed's case
a secret is held
Its fertile whisper
shapes a song
- Joan Halifax,
Marrow
The seeds of the day are best planted
in the first hour.
- Dutch Proverb
Think of the fierce energy
concentrated in an acorn!
You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!
Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.
- George Bernard Shaw
Now seeds are just dimes to the man in the
store
And the dimes are the things that he needs,
And I've been to buy them in seasons before
But have thought of them merely as seeds;
But it flashed through my mind as I took them this time,
"You purchased a miracle here for a dime."
- Edgar A. Guest, A Package of Seeds
In March and in April from morning till night
In sowing and seeding good housewives delight.
- Thomas Tusser
First the farmer sows the seed,
Then he stands and takes his ease,
Stamps his foot and claps his hands
And turns him round to view the land.
- 15th Century Song
Seedsmen reckon that their stock in
trade is not seeds at all ... it's optimism.
- Geoff Hamilton
The seed cannot sprout upwards without
simultaneously sending roots into the ground.
The seed includes all the possibilities of the tree. ... The seed will develop these
possibilities, however, only if it receives corresponding energies from the sky.
Grain must return to the earth, die, and decompose for new growth to begin.
- Ancient Egyptian Proverbs
Flowers and fruit are only the
beginning.
In the seed lies the life and the future.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley
He places a seed in the dust for the
reason
That it may in the day of distress, give fruit.
- Sadi
Poetry is like a free bird that knows
no boundary, like seeds
that are carried along by the wind, that grow, bloom and bear
fruit where they find good soil without
asking anyone's permission.
- Ion Codrescu
So I sing to my
seeds. What about it?
- Leslie Gaydos
Think small. Planting tiny
seeds in the small space given you
can change the whole world or, at the very least, your view of it.
- Linus Mundy
But the sower
going forth to sow sets foot
into time to come, the seeds falling
on his own place. He has prepared a way
for his life to come to him, if it will.
Like a tree, he has given roots
to the earth, and stands free.
- Wendell Berry, The Seeds, 1970
Ideas are like seeds, few ever grow
up to be something.
Promises of fruit being "Sweet" and
"Juicy" will sell seeds, and much much more.
- Michael Garofalo, Pulling
Onions: Observations of a Gardener
Months and Seasons
Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Verses, Lore, Myths, Holidays
Celebrations, Folklore, Reading, Links, Quotations
Information, Weather, Gardening Chores
One of the healthiest ways to gamble is
with a spade and a package of garden seeds.
- Dan Bennett
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oak trees come out of acorns, no matter how
unlikely that seems. An acorn is just a tree's
way back into the ground. For another try. Another trip through.
One life for another.
- Shirley Ann Grau
new year pledges
in my hand
pumpkin seeds
- Elizabeth St. Jacques, Poetry in the Light
The mere fact that you get a lot of seeds in
a packet
doesn't mean you have to plant all of them.
- Henry Mitchell
Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book
not only
suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a
season passes away
unimproved.
- George Washington
Sow the living part of yourselves in
the furrow of life.
- Miguel de Unamuno
A person who sows seed of kindness
enjoys a perpetual harvest.
Anonymous
The word "miracle" aptly
describes a seed.
- Jack Kramer
Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful
universe of God,
nothing seems to me more surprising that the planting of a seed
in the blank earth and the result thereof. Take that Poppy seed,
for instance: it lies in your palm, the merest atom of matter, hardly
visible, a speck, a pin's point in bulk, but within it is imprisoned a
spirit of beauty ineffable, which will break its bonds and emerge
from the dark ground and blossom in a splendor so dazzling
as to baffle all powers of description.
- Celia Thaxter
When I see that first, minuscule,
curled, pale green wisp
of a sprout poking up between a couple of grains of
vermiculite, I hear God speaking.
- June Santon, "Miracle in a Dixie Cup," Greenprints #44
A flower is the epitaph of a
seedling, and vice versa.
- Rein's Ruminations
Seeds of faith are always within us;
sometimes it takes a
crisis to nourish and encourage their growth.
- Susan L. Taylor
In every failure lies the seeds of
success.
- Deepak Chopra
Think small.
Planting tiny seeds in the small space given you
Can change the whole world or,
At the very least, your view of it.
- Linus Mundy
Of all created things the source is
one,
Simple, single as love; remember
The cell and seed of life, the sphere
That is, of child, white bird, and small blue dragon-fly
Green fern, and the gold four-petalled tormentilla
The ultimate memory.
Each latent cell puts out a future,
Unfolds its differing complexity
As a tree puts forth leaves, and spins a fate
Fern-traced, bird feathered, or fish-scaled.
- Kathleen Raine, Message From Home
Why does it take 1 million sperm to
fertilize one egg?
They won't stop to ask for directions.
As with all new
science, genetic manipulation of seed DNA
has possibilities for good and for evil. It depends on how
it's used and who controls it.
- Ruth S. Foster
But why should not the New Englander
try new
adventures - not lay so much stress on his grain,
his potato and grass crop, and his orchards - and
raise other crops than these? Why concern
ourselves so much about our beans for seed,
and not be concerned at all about
a new generation of men.
- Henry David Thoreau
If seeds in the black earth can turn
into such beautiful roses,
what might not the heart of man become in its long
journey toward the stars?
- G.K. Chesterton
He who plants a seed,
Beneath the sod;
And waits to see -
Believes in God.
- Author Unknown
All seed answer light, but the color is
different.
The plant reveals what is in the seed.
- Ancient Egyptian Proverbs
Give men new seeds and they will eat
now and plant for the
future; give them a religion, and they will starve to
death praying to Father Nature for seeds.
- Michael P. Garofalo
Planting
One for the mouse
One for crow.
One to rot,
One to grow.
This very act of planting a seed in
the earth
has in it to me something beautiful. I always do it
with a joy that is largely mixed with awe.
- Celia Thaxter