Nevertheless, it means much to have
loved,
To have been happy, to have laid my hand on
The living Garden, even for one day.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Adam Cast Forth
I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness,
as that ...
I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very
moderate conveniences
joined to them,
and there dedicate the remainder
of my life to the culture of them and the study of
nature.
- Abraham Cowley, circa 1655
To love someone who does not love you,
is
like shaking a tree to make the dew drops fall.
- Proverb from the Congo
Whoever has not learned to let Nature
have her way
is not fit for a gardener, or, for that matter, for a contented soul.
Disturbed is the condition of my
pool.
The mouth of my lover is a rosebud.
Her breast is a perfume.
Her arm is a ............ bough
Which offers a delusive seat.
Her forehead is a snare of meryu-wood.
- Eqyptian Love Poetry,
circa 1500.
A garden makes all our senses swim
with pleasure.
- William Lawson
So if you'll permit, a little advice
from two who have felt passion's sting:
if you invite art into the garden, be prepared for a lesson on love. It
seems only right that we learn love's lessons here; relationship is so
evident in a garden. Above the hum of ecosystems, life webs and
companion plantings, the gods whisper: true love, whether romantic
or platonic, brotherly, sisterly, for friend or humanity, transcends the
physical. It seeks a higher image of the human being. It is not a
feeling. It is an infinite, unifying force that speaks of the unity of life
and the interconnectedness of all things. So go ahead, invite art into
the garden, but go thoughtfully, prayerfully even, and stay firmly
rooted in the divine, for you are treading on passionate ground.
- Spring Gillard
Flowers - Quotes for Gardeners
God Almightie first Planted a Garden.
And indeed it is the Purest of Humane pleasures.
It is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirits of Man; Without which, Buildings
and Palaces are but Grosse Handy-works.
- Frances Bacon 1598
O Lord,
grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight until three o'clock
in the morning,
but, you see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak in; grant that at the same
time it would not rain on
campion, alyssum, heliaanthemum, lavender, and the others which you in your infinite
wisdom know are drought
loving plants - I will write their names on a paper if you like - and grant that the sun
may shine the whole day
long, but not everywhere (not for instance, on spiraea, or on gentian, plantain
lily, and rhododendron), and not
to much; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plant-lice and
snails, no mildew,
and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano may fall from heaven.
Amen.
- Karel Capek, The Gardener's Year, 1929
... in gardens, beauty is a
by-product.
The main business is sex and death ...
- Sam Llewelyn, The Sea Garden
People say "I want
peace." If you remove I (ego), and your
want (desire), you are left with peace.
- Satya Sai Baba
Months - Poems, Quotes, Links, Lore and Garden Chores
Any book about gardens, written for
the pleasure of writing, must
have its sources in dreams. The visions of gardens beautiful and
retired hover before the imagination, and no real garden, however
humble, but is invested in celestial light of cherished hopes of what
it may become in fragrant flowers or what it might have been
had fortune been kind.
- Lena May McCauley
If I had a flower for every time you
made me smile,
I'd be walking in an endless garden.
- Author Unknown
I am fully and intensely aware that
plants are conscious of love
and respond to it as they do to nothing else.
- Celia Thaxter
From moment to moment
Sliding in the silences
The creativity of being
Is love
- Maggie, UK, For Krishnamurti
Some people who have become
infatuated with the Arisaema clan
may find the plants sinister and malevolent, mysterious or erotic.
I think they are cute - weird but amiable. I love the Arisaemas,
and my passion intensifies as I get older and learn more about them.
If loving such a plant is a sign of arrested development, so be it.
Sex, after all, like gardening is one of the few interests that last a lifetime.
- Ken Druse, Desire Under the Jacks
Searching for plants
I love the green around us
the feeling of new life
surrounding us as we hug
between the rows
Lee Stapp
Timing, degree and conviction are the three
wise men in this life.
- R.I. Fitzhenry
Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.
- Standing Bear
Keep love in your heart. A life
without it is like
a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
- Oscar Wilde
There is no love sincerer than the love of
food.
George Bernard Shaw
The grass may be greener on the other
side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.
- Anonymous
The principle of agriculture is the
principle of ordered sexual union.
- John Jacob Bachofen, 1861
Separated lovers cheat absence by a
thousand fancies which have
their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and
they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways
of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent
of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing
of the wind, and the gleam of the stars - all the beauties of creation.
- Victor Hugo
Believe in yourself, your neighbors,
your work,
your ultimate attainment of more complete happiness.
It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the
Spring, who reaps a harvest in Autumn.
- B. C. Forbes
What do
we look for as reward?
Some little sounds, and scents, and scenes.
A small hand
darting strawberry-ward.
A woman's aprons full of greens.
The sense that we have brought to birth.
Out of the cold and heavy soil,
The
blessed fruits and flowers of earth.
Is large reward for our toil.
- Ruth Pitter, The
Diehards, 1941
How deeply seated in the human heart
is the liking for gardens and gardening.
- Alexander Smith
An addiction to gardening is not all
bad when
you consider all the other choices in life.
- Cora Lea Bell
To change your life:
Start immediately;
Do it flamboyantly;
No exceptions.
- William James
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
In this world there are only two tragedies: One is not
getting what one wants,
and the other is getting it.
- Oscar Wilde
A research project in Australia,
entitled "The Congruent Garden: an
Investigation into the Role of the Domestic Garden in Satisfying
Fundamental Human Needs," interviewed gardeners on the values of
gardening in their everyday lives. The researcher, Mike Steven,
established that gardens have the potential to satisfy nine basic human
needs (subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation,
leisure, creation, identity, freedom) across four existential states
(being, having, doing and interacting.)
- Mike Steven, Lecturer in Landscape Studies,
University of Westen Sydney, Australia
It used to be thought that our love
of plants was an impractical
but pure passion. But now, in the age of environmental crisis,
we're discovering that gardening is essential to human life.
- Jacqueline Heriteau
What is life? It is the flash of a
firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.
- Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian, 1890
Take it from us, it is utterly
forbidden to be half-hearted about gardening.
You have got to love your garden, whether you like it or not.
- W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, Garden Rubbish, 1936
The flowers do fade, and wanton
fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
- Sir Walter Raleigh, The Nymph's Reply to the Shepard
There are no green thumbs or black
thumbs. There are only gardeners and
non-gardeners. Gardeners are the one who ruin after ruin get on with the
high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and
tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises. It sounds very well to
garden a "natural way." You may see the natural way in any desert,
any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell. Defiance, on the other
hand, is what makes gardeners.
- Henry Mitchell
Some people like to make a little
garden out of life!
- Unknown Author
El corazon de la auyama solo lo conoce el cuchillo.
The heart --inside-- of a pumpkin or
edible squash is only known by the knife.
A life with love must have some
thorns,
but a life with no love will have no roses.
- Author Unknown
Nature: The Unseen Intelligence which
loved us into being,
and is disposing of us by the same token.
- Elbert Hubbard
Love is like dew that falls on both
nettles and lilies.
Swedish Proverb
It is curious, pathetic almost, how deeply
seated in the human heart
is the liking for gardens and gardening.
- Alexander Smith
There are always some of us, not a
few, in every generation, who go over
wholly to the green flag. It is such a passionless fealty, so reticent a love,
that
neither do trumpets sound for it nor quarrels arise from it. Only, you will
find
that those who have pledged allegiance are happy about it in quiet.
- Donald C. Peattie, Flowering Earth, 1939
Emotion always has its roots in the
unconscious and manifests itself in the body.
- Irene Claremont de Castillejo
What you do not like done to
yourself, do not do unto others.
- Confucius, 500 BC
Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you.
- Christian Gospels Proverb, 100 AD
Desire nothing for yourself, which
you do not desire for others.
- Spinoza, 1670 AD
A life without love is like a year
without summer.
- Swedish Proverb
A flower touches everyone's heart.
- Georgia O'Keefe
One of the most delightful things
about a garden
is the anticipation it provides.
- W. E. Johns
The garden is so ferociously sexy at night,
it's almost lurid.
- Anne Raver
The only limit to your garden is at
the boundaries of your imagination.
- Thomas D. Church
Quotes for Gardeners
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clichés, Adages
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Over 6MB of Text
Then Heaven, the Father almighty,
comes down in fruitful showers
into the lap of his joyous spouse, and his might, with her
mighty frame comingling, nurtures all growths.
- Virgil, Georgics, circa 90 B.C.
The love of gardening is a seed that once
sown never dies.
- Gertrude Jekyll
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone:
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
On a bed of daffodil sky.
- Lord Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892
Who loves a garden still his Eden
keeps.
- Amos Bronson Alcott
Simplicity - Quotes for Gardeners
The heart's affections are divided like the
branches of the cedar tree; if the tree loses one
strong branch; it will suffer but it does not die; it will pour all its vitality into
the next
branch so that it will grow and fill the empty place.
- Khalil Gibran
Much happiness is lost in the pursuit of it.
Believe in yourself, your neighbors, your
work, your ultimate attainment of more
complete happiness. It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the
Spring, who reaps a harvest in Autumn.
- B. C. Forbes
If you have the desire, you are
halfway there.
- E. Crique
Gardeners (or just plain simple
writers who write about the garden) always have
something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them
in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy; at
any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.
- Jamaica Kincaid, My Favorite Plant
The trouble with gardening is that is
does not remain an avocation.
It becomes an obsession.
- Phyllis McGinley
I believe if I should die, and you
were to walk near my grave,
from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.
- Benito Perez Galdos
Thank God for unanswered prayers.
- Garth Brooks
To love what you do and feel that it
matters--how could anything be more fun?
- Katherine Graham
Flowers are love's truest language.
- Park Benjamin
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
Your words are my food, your breath
my wine.
You are everything to me.
- Sarah Bernhardt
If it's rare, we want it. If
it's tiny and impossible to grow,
we've got to have it. It it's brown, looks dead,
and has black flowers we'll kill for it.
- Ken Druse
I knew in my heart that I wanted to
know the garden intimately, to know
all the flowers in each season, to be there from spring through autumn,
digging, pruning, planting, feeding, rejoicing. In short, I had fallen in love.
- Elizabeth Murray
The power of love to change bodies is
legendary, built into folklore, common sense,
and everyday experience. Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around ...
Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been
recognized as a valuable element in healing.
- Larry Dossey
Gardeners, I think, dream bigger
dreams than Emperor's.
- Mary Cantwell
By the time you find greener
pastures,
you can't climb over the fence.
When the world wearies, and society
ceases to satisfy,
there is always the garden.
- Author Unknown
Plant on a whim. Lay the
footpath where your heart says it should be.
Change things because you feel like it. Garden for the love of it.
- Lindley
Karstens
We'll dive into the earth together.
And if one day a wild flower
finds water and springs up from that piece of earth, its stem will
have two blooms for sure: one will be you, the other me.
- Nazim Hikmet, Letter From My Wife
Memories are forget-me-nots gathered along life's way,
pressed close to the human heart into a perennial bouquet.
- Clara Smith Reber
We had lost all ordinary sense of time and
place. Those flowers that came new
to Lawrence, the fireflies at night and the glow-worms, the first beech leaves
spreading on the trees like a delicate veil overhead, and our feet buried in last
year's brown beech leaves, these were our time and our events.
When Lawrence first found a gentian, a big single blue one, I remember feeling
as if he had a strange communion with it, as if the gentian yielded up its blueness,
its very essence, to him. Everything he met had the newness of a creation
just that moment come into being.
- Frieda Lawrence writing about her 1912 honeymoon with D. H. Lawrence
Priapus, lively and
naughty, aroused and outlandish, is the Duende
de el Jardin.
Mother Nature is always pregnant.
Fruits, nuts, grains ... sex and food. Flowers ... sex and
beauty.
If it were not for the sex life of plants, we would have no sex life of our own.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling
Onions
So rests the sky against the earth. The
dark still tarn in the lap of the forest.
As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare
ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning. I feel
an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A
longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned
by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the
wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no -- but
refreshed,
rested -- while waiting.
- Dag Hammarskjold
One can get lost in their garden and
the rest of the world ceases
to exist, if only for a while. Anger dissipates
with every shovel of
dirt moved, pleasure is found in the simplest forms, excitement
is felt as each tiny plant matures and then triumph with the harvest
of the first tomato of the season. The love of gardening never
goes away. Even if someone is unable to garden themselves,
they enjoy the gardens of others.
- Renee Hogan
The hours I spend with you I look
upon as sort of a
perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing
to it … you and you alone make me feel that I am alive.
Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have
seen thee and thou art enough.
- George Moore
Grow along with me,
the best is yet to be.
Gardening is a cooperative affair.
I am a
part of a neighborhood in which plants, dirt,
rocks and a human family participate collectively
in a love affair with place.
- Jim Nollman, Why We Garden, The Sentient
Garden
I have a garden of my own,
Shining with flowers of every hue;
I loved it dearly while alone,
But I shall love it more with your:
And there the golden bees shall come,
In summer time at the break of morn,
And wake us with their busy hum
Around the Siha's fragrant thorn.
- Thomas Moore, The Casket, 1835
Love is the flower of life, and
blossoms unexpectedly and without law,
and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for
the brief hour of its duration.
- D. H. Lawrence
We grow great by dreams. All
big men are dreamers. They see things in the
soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some
of
us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them
through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes
always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.
- Woodrow Wilson
I didn't know what narcissism was
until I beheld my own naricssus.
- Charles Kuralt
We are told that in Persia the tulip,
whose blossom in its native
country is scarlet, while the centre of its glowing cup is black,
is used to express warm affection; and, when sent by a lover,
will convey to the object of his attachment the idea that like
this flower, his face is warm and his heart is consumed as a coal.
- Anne Pratt, The Field, the Garden and the Woodland,
1838
Danger and delight grow on one stalk.
- English Proverb
The rose speaks of love silently,
in a language known only to the heart.
- Author Unknown
The pleasure of a garden are everyday
renewed. A garden is the
only complete delight the world affords, even complying with our
various and mutable minds.
- Author Unknown
After all these years I see that I
was mistaken about Eve
in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden
with her than inside it without her.
- Mark Twain
This morning, in the Garden of Delight, love came gently on us.
Its sweet melody whispered in the trees, shivering the leaves.
Its fragrance wafted through the tapestry of flowers
And flicked the ears of the massive hounds,
While the white unicorn stepped daintily under fruit trees.
- Gillian Savage, Garden
of Delight
Life and love are life and love, a
bunch of violets is a bunch of violets,
and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let
live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve
which flows on, pointless.
- D.H. Lawrence
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
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
Desire - Quotes for Gardeners. Version 4.7.
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong