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It is now maintained and updated at:
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Scents bring memories, and many
memories
bring nostalgic pleasure. We would be wise to plan
for this when we plant a garden.
- Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season,
1973
Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.
- Heinrich Heine
It grew late. Through the open
door, stealthily,
came the scent of madonna lilies,
almost as if it were prowling abroad.
- D. H. Lawrence
Today I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
An the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;
- Edward Thomas, Digging
When I was a boy, I thought scent was
contained
in dewdrops on flowers and if I got up very early in
the morning, I could collect it and make perfume.
- Oscar De La Renta
The gardens of my youth were fragrant
gardens
and it is their sweetness rather than their patterns of their
furnishings that I now most clearly recall.
- Louise Beebe Wilder
Sweetly breathing , vernal air,
That with kind warmth doth repair
Winter's ruins; from whose breast
All the gums and spice of the East
Borrow their perfumes; whose eye
Gilds the morn, and clears the sky.
- Thomas Carew, 1595 - 1645
My garden, with its silence and
pulses of fragrance that come
and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music.
Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.
- Alexander Smith
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,000 Quotes Arranged by Over 105 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden
for the nose,
and the eyes will take care of themselves.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Don't wear perfume in the garden
unless you want to be pollinated by bees.
- Anne Raver
There are few pleasures like really
burrowing one's nose into sweet peas.
- Angela Thirkell
Here comes the time when, vibrating
on its stem,
every flower fumes like a censer;
noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.
- Charles Baudelaire
Flowers - Quotes for Gardeners
Can words describe the fragrance of
the very breath of
spring - that delicious commingling of the perfume of arbutus,
the odor of pines, and the snow-soaked soil just warming into life.
- Neltje Blanchan
Through the open door
A drowsy smell of flowers -
grey heliotrope
And white sweet clover,
and shy mignonette
Comes fairly in, and silent chorus
leads
To the pervading symphony of Peace.
- John Greenleaf Whittier
Earth knows no desolation.
She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.
- George Meredith
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden
of beautiful flowers
where I can walk undisturbed.
- Walt Whitman, Give Me That Splendid Silent Sun,
1819 - 1892
The flowers never waste their
sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter,
on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human
being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men,
that they dye their petals or waft their scents.
- Joseph Wood Krutch
The strange thing which I have experienced
with flower scents, and indeed with all
other scents, is that they only recall pleasant memories.
- Theodore A. Stephens
How miraculous that growing on my own
little plot of land are plants
that can turn the dead soil into a hundred flavors as different as
horseradish and thyme, smells ranging from stinkhorn to lavender.
- John Seymour
I went out into the garden in the morning dusk,
When sorrow enveloped me like a cloud;
And the breeze brought to my nostril the odor of spices,
As balm of healing for a sick soul.
- Moses Ibn Ezra, 1060 - 1138
They walked over the crackling leaves
in the garden, between the lines of box,
breathing its fragrance of eternity; for this is one of the odors which carry us
out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past; if we ever lived on another
ball of stone than this, it must be that there was box growing on it.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
My lilac trees are old and tall;
I cannot reach their bloom at all.
They send their perfume over trees
And roof and streets, to find the bees.
- Lousie Driscoll, 1875 - 1957, My
Garden Is a Pleasant Place
Those herbs which perfume the air most
delightfully, not passed by as the rest,
but, being trodden upon and crushed, are three;
that is, burnet, wild thyme and watermints. Therefore, you are to set
whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.
- Frances Bacon
I go to nature to be soothed and
healed,
and to have my senses put in order.
- John Burroughs
Fragrance, whether strong or
delicate, is a highly subjective matter,
and one gardener's perfume is another gardener's stink.
- Katharine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, 1979
The lime trees were in bloom.
But in the early morning only a
faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an
aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
- Isak Dinesen
A man ought to carry himself in the
world as an orange tree
would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging
perfume from every little censer it holds up in the air.
- Henry Ward Beecher
For many people the scent of certain
plants can revive
memories with a vividness that nothing else can equal,
for the sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative,
bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of
scenes that and left the conscious mind.
- Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973
O the green things growing, the green
things growing,
The faint sweet smell of the green things growing!
- Dinah Mulock Craik
That which above all other yields the
sweetest smell in the air is the violet.
- Francis Bacon
This webpage was moved to a
new URL.
It is now maintained and updated at:
http://www.egreenway.com/reason/smell.htm
So great is the
economy of Nature, that most flowers which
are fertilized by crepuscular or nocturnal insects emit their
odor chiefly or exculsively in the evening.
- Charles Darwin
Nothing revives the past so
completely as a smell
that was once associated with it.
- Nabokov
To be overcome by the fragrance of
flowers
is a delectable form of defeat.
- Beverly Nichols
Hearing - Quotes for Gardeners
... the most fiendish plant I know of, the
sort of thing Beelzebub might pluck to make a bouquet for his mother-in-law ... it looks
as if it had been made out of a sow's ear for the spathe, and the tail of a rat that died
of Elephantiasis for the spadix. The whole thing is mingling of unwholesome greens,
livid purples, and pallid pinks, the livery of putrescence in fact, and it possesses and
odour to match the colouring.
- E. A. Bowles, My Garden in Spring, 1914
Speaking about the Dracunculus vulgaris, syn. Arum Dracunculus
(Dragon Arum)
For more suggestions from mAlice about plants that appeal to
"Gothic" tastes be sure to visit:
Gothic Gardening: Something Wicked This Way
Grows
Your nose is the scenter of your face.
Scent is the most potent and
bewitching substance in the
gardener's repertory and yet it is the most neglected and
least understood. The faintest waft is sometimes enough
to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport
you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment
in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply
tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and
evaporating almost the moment it it detected. Each fragrance,
whether sweet or spicy, light or heavy, comes upon you
in its own way and evokes its own emotional response.
- Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991
The gift
of perfume to a flower is a special grace
like genius or like beauty, and never becomes
common or cheap.
- John Burroughs
In the spring, at the end of the day, you
should smell like dirt.
- Margaret Atwood
This webpage was moved to a
new URL.
It is now maintained and updated at:
http://www.egreenway.com/reason/smell.htm
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity
and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions
Quips, Maxims and Observations by Michael P.
Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,000 Quotes, Arranged by 105 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
Smelling - Quotes for Gardeners. Version 3.3.5.
The Poetry Notebooks of Michael P. Garofalo
The History of Gardening Timeline