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A flower's fragrance declares to
all the world that it is fertile,
available, and desirable, its sex organs oozing with nectar.
Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigor, life-force,
all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth.
We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages,
we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire.
- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses,
1990, p. 13
I'd rather have roses
on my table than diamonds on my neck.
- Emma Goldman
I know of no other genus
whose plants flower out-of-doors
every day of the year. I know of no other genus with one
or more species coming into bloom or growth,
peaking or going dormant at every season.
- Nancy Goodwin, Cyclamen
I do not think I have ever
seen anything more beautiful
than the bluebell I have been looking at.
I know the beauty of our Lord by it.
- Gerald Manley Hopkins
Where flowers bloom so
does hope.
- Lady Bird Johnson, Public
Roads: Where Flowers Bloom
Trees - Quotes, Poetry, Maxims and Sayings for Gardeners
Each flower is a soul
opening out to nature.
- Gerald De Nerval
Perfumes are the feelings
of flowers.
- Heinrich Heine
The world is a
rose; smell it and pass it to your friends.
- Persian Proverb
When bright flowers bloom
Parchment crumbles, my words fade
The pen has dropped ...
- Morpheus
Are we, finally, speaking
of nature or culture when
we speak of a rose (nature), that has been bred (culture)
so that its blossoms (nature) make men
imagine (culture) the sex of women (nature)?
It may be this sort of confusion that we need more of.
- Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991
Flowers are love's truest
language.
- Park Benjamin
The Earth Laughs in
Flowers
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To pick a flower is so much
more satisfying than just observing it,
or photographing it ... So in later years, I have grown in my
garden as many flowers as possible for children to pick.
- Anne Scott-James
I will be the gladdest
thing under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
flower arrangement:
just two yellow daffodils,
the first to bloom
- L.A. Davidson, The Shape of the Tree
Haiku is What?
Belladonna: In Italian, a
beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
They are not long,
the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
- Ernest Dowson, 1867 - 1900
There came a time when the
risk to remain tight in the bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anais Nin
Flowers II - Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Links, References
Flowers are the sweetest
things God
ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
- Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts
What's in a name? that
which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
What grows in the garden,
so lovely and rare?
Roses and Dahlias and people grow there.
- From the TV show A Gardener's Diary
Work - Quotes, Poetry, Maxims and Sayings for Gardeners
And if you voz to see my
roziz
As is a boon to all men's noziz, -
You'd fall upon your back and scream -
'O Lawk! O criky! it's a dream!'
- Edward Lear, 1885
It is at the edge of a
petal that love waits.
- William Carlos Williams
If you pass by the color
purple in a field and
don't notice it, God gets real pissed off.
- Alice Walker
I didn't know what
narcissism was
until I beheld my own naricssus.
- Charles Kuralt
Lone and erect, beneath
light's primal flood,
A lily! and pure as any one of you.
- Mallarme
Who can estimate the
elevating and refining influences and moral value
of flowers with all their graceful forms, bewitching shades and combinations
of colors and exquisitely varied perfumes? These silent influences are
unconsciously felt even by those who do not appreciate them consciously
and thus with better and still better fruits, nuts, grains, vegetables and
flowers, will the earth be transformed, man's thought refined, and turned
from the base destructive forces into nobler production. One which will
lift him to high planes of action toward the happy day when the Creator
of all this beautiful work is more acknowledged and loved, and where man
shall offer his brother man, not bullets and bayonets, but richer grains,
better fruit and fairer flowers from the bounty of this earth.
- Father George
Schoener (1864 -1941),
The Importance and Fundamental Principles of Plant
Breeding
Take time to smell the
roses.
- Gardening Cliches
For myself I hold no
preferences among flowers,
so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.
Bricks to all greenhouses!
Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
- Edward Abbey
Observe this dew-drenched
rose of Tyrian gardens
A rose today. But you will ask in vain
Tomorrow what it is; and yesterday
It was the dust, the sunshine, and the rains.
- Christina Rosetti
There are philosophies as
varied as the flowers of the field,
and some of them weeds and a few of them poisonous weeds.
But they none of them create the psychological conditions
in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.
- G. K. Chesterton
Since Iris is the Greek
goddess for the Messenger of Love, her sacred
flower is considered the symbol of communication and messages.
Greek men would often plant an iris on the graves of their beloved
women as a tribute to the goddess Iris, whose duty it was to
take the souls of women to the Elysian fields.
- Hana
No Monogatari: The Stories of Flowers
The actual flower is the
plant's highest fulfilment, and are not
here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant
geography: they are here first of all for delight.
- John Ruskin
In the dooryard fronting an old
farm-house near the white-wash'd
palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
with many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I
love,
With every leaf a miracle - and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1865
If there were nothing else to
trouble us, the fate of the flowers would make us sad.
- John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections
Forsythia is pure
joy. There is not an ounce, not a
glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia.
Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
With a few flowers in my
garden, half a dozen pictures
and some books, I live without envy.
- Lope de Vega
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
I perhaps owe having become a
painter to flowers.
- Claude Monet
In the cherry
blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.
- Issa
Flowers are not made by
singing "Oh, how beautiful,"
and siting in the shade.
- Rudyard Kipling
`Uo `ia i ka manai
ho`okahi.
Strung like flowers on the same lei needle.
Married.
Hawaiian
Proverbs
Earth's crammed with
heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes -
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
- Elizabeth Barrett Brownbing
Different flowers look good to
different people
Pick the flower when it is ready to be picked.
The flower that you spent time to care for does not grow while the willow
that your accidentally planted flourishes and gives shade.
- Chinese
Proverbs
Little flower, but if I could understand, what
you are, root
and all in all, I should know what God and man is.
- Tennyson
He who is born with a
silver spoon in his mouth is generally
considered a fortunate person, but his good fortune is small
compared to that of the happy mortal who enters this world
with a passion for flowers in his soul.
- Celia Thaxter
True friendship is like a
rose: we don't realize its beauty until it fades.
- Evelyn Loeb
If of thy mortal goods thou art
bereft,
And of thy meager store
Two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.
- Sheikh Muslih-uddin Saadi Shirazi, The
Gulistan of Saadi, 1270
As well as any bloom upon a
flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.
- Edward Thomas, 1878-1917
In my garden there is a
large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers
is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely
as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful.
- Abram L. Urban
In friendship's
fragrant garden,
There are flowers of every hue.
Each with its own fair beauty
And its gift of joy for you.
- Friendship's
Garden
The flower is the
poetry of reproduction.
It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
- Jean Giraudoux
None can have a healthy
love for flowers
unless he loves the wild ones.
- Forbes Watson
The old tree is shook
White blossoms slowly float down
Dancers in the wind
- Alexandra Kim
Seasons - Quotes, Poetry, Maxims and Sayings for Gardeners
From a thorn comes a rose,
and from a rose comes a thorn.
Greek Proverb
He who wants a rose must
respect the thorn.
Persian Proverb
The rose has thorns only for those who
would gather it.
- Chinese proverb
But ne'er the rose without the thorn.
- Robert Herrick
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns,
or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
- Abraham Lincoln
This old world that we're livin' in
Is might hard to beat.
You get a thorn with every Rose
But - ain't the roses
sweet?
- Frank Stanton
Some people are always
grumbling because roses have thorns.
I am thankful that thorns have roses.
- Alphonse Karr (1808-1890)
Often the prickly thorn produces tender roses
- Ovid
Nullum est iam dictum quod non
dictum sit prius.
Nothing is said that hasn't been said before.
- Terence, Eunuchus
[Actually, plenty remains to the said about what
has not been said before and what has been said before.]
Everything has been thought of
before, but the difficulty is to think of it again.
- Goethe
In the hope of reaching the
moon
men fail to see the flowers
that blossom at their feet.
- Albert Schweitzer
When you take a flower in your hand and
really look at it,
it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to
someone else. Most people in the city rush around so,
they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see
it whether they want to or not.
- Georgia O'Keeffe
Simplicity - Quotes for Gardeners
Let us open our leaves like
a flower,
and be passive and receptive.
- John Keats
If, I can someday see M. Claude
Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that
is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an
old-fashioned flower
garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not
entirely nature's,
because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will
bloom at the
same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.
- Marcel Proust, "Splendours". Le Figaro,
June 15, 1907
It will never rain
roses. When we want to have more roses,
we must plant more roses.
- George Eliot
At dawn I asked the lotus,
'What is the meaning of life?'
Slowly she opened her hand
with nothing in it.
- Debra Woolard Bender, Paper
Lanterns
Science, or para-science,
tells us that geraniums bloom better if they
are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite
enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding
and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them.
- Victoria Glendinning
Flowers bring to a
liberall and gentlemanly minde
the remembrance of honestie, comelinesse and
all kindes of virtues.
- John Gerard
Who would have thought it
possible that a tiny little flower
could preoccupy a person so completely that there simply
wasn't room for any other thought....
- Sophie Scholl
Today as in the time of
Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth
flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on
the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have
changed their masters and their names, collided and
smashed, disappeared into nothingness, their peaceful
generations have crossed down the ages as fresh and
smiling as on the days of battle.
- Edgar Quinet, Philosophy of Human History,
1825
Let me show you
Sweet smell of a delicate whisper
Behind the vision of gardens
Go and read of your life
Tiny ripping at the heart
Drunk from a rose
- Erica Caitlin Lee
And 't is my faith, that
every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
- William Wordsworth
The garden should be adorned with
roses and lilies, the turnsole, violets, and mandrake;
there you should have parsley, cost, fennel, southern-wood, coriander,
sage, savory,
hyssop, mint, rue, dittany, smallage, pellitory, lettuces, garden-cress,
and peonies. There
should also be beds planted with onions, leeks, garlic, pumpkins and
shallots. The
cucumber growing in its lap, the drowsy poppy, the daffodil and
brank-ursine ennoble
a garden. Nor are there wanting, if occasion further thee,
pottage-herbs: beets,
herb-mercury, orache, sorrel and mallows, anise, mustard, white pepper and
wormwood do good service to the gardener.
- Alexander of Neckham, Of the Nature of Things, 1187
One of the most attractive
things about
the flowers is their beautiful reserve.
- Henry David Thoreau
Flowers leave some of their
fragrance in the hand that bestows them.
- Chinese proverb
I don't know whether nice
people tend to grow roses
or growing roses makes people nice.
- Roland A Beowne
We gathered the
wild-flowers.
Yes, life there seem'd one pure delight;
As thro' the field we rov'd.
Yes, life there seem'd one pure delight.
- George Linley
Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
The world of the flower, the whole of
the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth
of the blossom:
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.
- Zenkei Shibayama..
Flowers construct the most
charming geometries: circles like the sun,
ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which
when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian
frieze of psychedelic silhouettes.
- Duane Michals, The Vanishing Act
A rose is a rose
is a rose.
- Gertrude Stein
I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown,
And lilies, that you would it guess
to be a little wilderness.
- Andrew Marvell
Break open
A cherry tree
And there are no flowers,
But the spring breeze
Brings forth myriad blossoms.
- Ikkyu Sojun, 1394-1481
A flowerless room is a
soulless room, to my way of thinking;
but even on solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.
- Vita Sackville-West
If thou canst but thither,
There grows the flower of Peace,
The Rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress and thy ease.
- Henry Vaughn
Simply trust:
Do not the petals flutter down,
Just like this?
- Issa
Footfalls echo in the
memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
All the flowers of all the
tomorrows are in the seeds of today.
- Indian Proverb
Every flower about a house
certifies to the refinement of somebody.
Every vine climbing and blossoming tells of love and joy"
- Robert G. Ingersoll
Lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.
- George Meredith
Every child is born a
naturalist. His eyes are, by nature,
open to the glories of the stars, the beauty of the flowers,
and the mystery of life.
- R. Search
The Amen! of Nature is
always a flower.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Spirituality - Quotes, Poetry, Maxims and Sayings for Gardeners
Eighty percent of the world's rose species come from Asia.
Don't try to force
anything. Let life be a deep let-go.
See [God/Spirit/All That Is] opening millions of flowers
every day without forcing the buds.
- Bhagwan Shree Rayneesh
To analyze the charms of flowers
is like dissecting music;
it is one of those things which it is far better to enjoy,
than to attempt to fully understand.
- Henry T. Tuckerman
In joy or sadness,
flowers are our constant friends.
- Kozuko Okakura
I didn't know the names
of the flowers - now
my garden is gone.
- Allen Ginsberg
The gardens that make us
happiest flourish because we have taken the time to make sure
they feed our souls and fill a special place in our lives. Sometimes you have to
think about
what you really want from your garden ...
once the beds are laid out and the rose bushes planted.
- Lindley
Karstens
You love the roses -
so do I. I wish
The sky would rain down roses, as they rain
From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white
And soft to tread on. They would fall as light
As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be
Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!
- George Eliot, Roses
In the 1600's, a language of
flowers developed in Constantinople
and in the poetry of Persia. Charles II introduced the Persian
poetry to Europe, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought
the flower language from Turkey to England in 1716. It spread
to France and became a handbook of 800 floral messages
known as the Book Le Language des Fleurs. Lovers exchanged
messages as they gave each other selected flowers or bouquets.
A full red rose meant beauty. Red and white mean unity. Crocus
said "abuse not", while a white rosebud warns that one is too
young for love. Yellow roses were for jealousy, yellow iris for
passion, filbert for reconciliation and ivy for marriage.
- Valentine's Day
Love Traditions
X-References
Garden Poems Garden Sayings Gardening Sayings Gardening Quotes
January 23, 2003