Touching Seeing Hearing Smelling Tasting Sensing Body-Mind
Pleasures Happiness Work Beauty Tranquility Spirituality
"As the biocentric view suggests, the garden prospers when control is balanced
by equal measures of humility and benevolence. A balance is struck. Control,
servitude, respect, imagination, pragmatism, an ecological conscience, compliance,
and a certain measure of mysticism and altruism all meld together to provide nurturance. Try to separate the various aspects into their constituent parts -
grant
any one of them the status of fundamental gardening definition and one soon
skews the entire process. Put them back together again in the service of the
two-way street called nurturance, and we express the state of grace called gardening."
- Jim Nollman, Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place, 1994
"Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and
meditative occupation.
It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart."
- Karel Capek
"As the biocentric view suggests, the
garden prospers when control is balanced by equal measures of humility and benevolence. A balance is struck. Control, servitude, respect, imagination, pragmatism, an ecological conscience, compliance, and a certain measure of mysticism and altruism, all meld together to provide nurturance."
- Jim Nollman, Why We Garden
"I have found, through years of
practice, that people garden in order to make something grow; to interact with nature; to share, to find sanctuary, to heal, to honor the earth, to leave a mark. Through gardening, we feel whole as we make our personal work of art upon our land."
- Julie Moir Messervy, The Inward Garden, 1995
"Gardening is ultimately a folly whose goal is to provide delight."
-
Deborah
Needleman
"Seek to understand what draws you to
the garden. You may discover greater rewards than the blue ribbons awarded for the biggest pumpkin or the best preserves. You may find the garden becomes a teacher and crop "failures" become lessons learned. However big or small your garden is, if you allow nature to touch your spirit, gardening will bring returns of peace, satisfaction, and well-being for as long as you continue to wander the garden path."
- Norman H. Hansen, The Worth of Gardening
"The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part
plowman.
He modifies the climate around his home."
- John R. Whiting
"Gardening is an exercise in optimism. Sometimes, it is a triumph of hope over experience."
- Marina Schinz
Quotes for Gardeners
Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes,
Proverbs, Maxims, and
Insights
Quotes for Those Who Love
Gardens, Gardening, and the Green Way
Arranged by Over 250 Topics.
Over 18 Megabytes of Text.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
"Gardening is the art that uses
flowers and plants as paint,
and the soil and sky as canvas."
- Elizabeth Murray
"Gardening is a labour full of
tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive,
and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation,
experience, health and longevity."
- John Evelyn, 1666
"A garden really lives only insofar as it is an
expression of faith,
the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise."
- Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener, 1962
"Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great
gardens have
in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into
the garden,
so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief
moment
one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other
words,
is mystical no matter what its actual content."
- Ken Wilbur, Grace and Grit
"Show me your garden and I shall tell
you what you are."
- Alfred Austin
"Gardening is any way that humans and
nature come together with the intent of creating beauty."
- Tina James
"Garden: One of a vast number of free
outdoor restaurants operated by
charity-minded amateurs in an effort to provide healthful, balanced
meals for insects, birds and animals."
- Henry Beard and Roy McKie,
Gardener's Dictionary
Advice Beauty Bibliography Blog Body-Mind Broad Minded Cheerfulness
Contemplation Desires Dharmapada Sutra Education Epicureanism Equanimity
Feeling Fitness Five Senses Friendship Gardening Generosity
Happiness Hedonism Hospitality Independence Kindness Learning Links
Memory Mindfulness Moderation Open Minded Paramitas Awe
Patience Philosophy Play Pleasures Qigong Self-Reliance
Sensory Pleasures Simplicity Somaesthetics Stoicism Taijiquan
Tao Te Ching Thinking Tolerance Touching Tranquility Vigor Vision
Walking Willpower Wisdom Wonder Zen Precepts Cloud Hands Blog
"It is always exciting to open the
door and go out into the garden for the first time on any day."
- Marion Cran
"Gardening is medicine that does not need a prescription ... And with no limit on dosage."
- Author unknown
"Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about
everything - except itself."
- May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968
"What, if anything, do the infinity of different traditional and individual ideas of a
garden have in common? They vary so much in purpose, in size, in style and content that not even flowers, or even plants at all, can be said to be essential. In the last
analysis there is only one common factor between all gardens, and this is the control of nature by
man. Control, that is, for aesthetic reasons. .... The essence is control. Without
constant watchful care a garden - any garden - rapidly returns to the state of the country all around it."
- Hugh Johnson, The Principles of Gardening, 1979
"I don't think we'll ever know all there is
to know about gardening, and I'm just as glad
there will always be some magic about it!"
- Barbara Damrosch
"A garden always gives back more than
it receives."
- Mara Beamish
"The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before."
"You become responsible, forever, for
what you have tamed."
- Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Little Prince
"He who cultivates a garden, and
brings to perfection flowers and fruits cultivates and advances at the same time his own nature."
- Ezra Weston, 1845
"This garden is no metaphor ─
more a task that swallows you into itself,
earth using, as always, everything it can."
- Jan Hirshfield, November,
Remembering Voltaire
"An addiction to gardening is not all
bad when
you consider all the other choices in life."
- Cora Lea Bell
"Gardening gives me fun and health and
knowledge. It gives me laughter and colour. It gives me pictures of almost incredible beauty."
- John F. Kenyon
"Gardens are not created or made, they
unfold, spiraling open like the silk petals of an evening primrose flower to reveal the ground plot of the mind and heart of the gardener and the good earth."
- Wendy Johnson, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, 2000
"The garden is a ground plot for the
mind."
- Thomas Hill, 1577
"Agriculture probably required a far greater
discipline than did any form of food collecting. Seeds had to be planted at certain seasons, some protection had to be given to the
growing plants and animals, harvests had to be reaped, stored and divided. Thus, we
might argue that it was neither leisure time nor a sedentary existence but the more rigorous
demands associated with an agricultural way of life that led to great cultural changes."
- Charles Heiser, Seed to Civilization
"Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must
finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall."
- Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963
"I garden, therefore I am."
-
Shelly's
Space
"Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure
less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green glade ...
Such was that happy garden-state, ..."
- Andrew Marvell,
The Garden
"Why do plants have such a positive impact
on us?
There are a number of reasons, including:
They have a predictable cycle of life that provides comfort
in our time of rapid change.
They are responsive but non-threatening.
They form no opinions or judgments about their caregivers.
They soften our man-made environment.
They enable us to change or improve our environment.
They promote relaxation and tranquility."
- Gardening
- Therapy for Mind, Body and Soul, Proxima Health System, Atlanta
History of Gardening Timeline Flowers Trees Water Earth Green Way Blog
"The lesson I have thoroughly learnt,
and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives."
- Gertrude Jekyll
"When your
garden is finished I hope it will be more beautiful that you anticipated, require less care than you expected,
and have cost only a little more than you had planned."
- Thomas D. Church
"A callused palm and dirty fingernails
precede a Green Thumb.
Wishes are like seeds, few ever develop into something.
Sitting in a garden and doing nothing is high art everywhere.
Beauty is the Mistress, the gardener Her slave.
Complexity is closer to the truth.
When all the chores are done, the avid gardener will invent some new ones.
Where are the fig blossoms? Exceptions to every rule.
Only two percent of all insects are harmful. Why are they all in my garden?
The joyful gardener is evidence of an incarnation.
As with most arts, gardening is an expression of our hands.
To dig is to discover.
The ten thousand things are more enchanting than the Silent One.
To lift the mind, move the body.
Gardening is a slower path to a richer sensuality.
To garden is to open your heart to the sky.
The road to flourishing needs regular maintenance and repairs.
The present is merely a fleeting moment; we actually unearth our essence in our
past and create ourselves in the future.
Having a poor memory helps a great deal in finding happiness.
A garden is a feeling.
Absolutes squirm beneath realities.
Your never too old to embrace a stupid idea.
The end of the garden is at the end of a hose.
A gardener loves the rain; also, for the resting time it brings.
In general, be more specific.
The Laws of Gardening are mostly local ordinances.
Sitting in a garden and doing nothing is high art everywhere.
Gardening is but one battle against Chaos."
- Michael P. Garofalo,
Pulling
Onions
Over 890 ideas, quips,
observations, thoughts, and reflections of a philosophical gardener.
"The man who has planted a garden feels that
he has done something for the good of the world."
- Charles Dudley Warner
"Gardening is a humbling experience."
- Martha Stewart
"Gardens always mean
something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another."
- Robert Harbison
"I look back with gladness to the day
when I found the path to the land of heart's desire, and thank Fate ceaselessly with a loud voice that she did not permit the town to sap all the years away while the heart was turning to wind-voices and flower-faces and the hands of kindly earth."
- Mrs. George Cran, The Garden of Ignorance, 1913
"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
"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 Western Sydney, Australia
"The word 'garden' comes from the Old English 'geard', meaning a
fence or enclosure, and from 'garth' meaning a yard or a piece of enclosed ground. The Oxford
Dictionary
of English Etymology gives the meaning of garden as 'enclosed cultivated ground'
and The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as 'an enclosed piece of ground
devoted to the cultivation of flowers, fruit or vegetables'. Enclosure is essential to
gardening, and this raises fundamental questions, such as who is doing the enclosing, who owns the land,
and who is being kept out."
- Martin Hoyles, The Story of Gardening, 1991
"I also know that we should
cultivate our gardens."
- Voltaire,
Candide
"People are turning to their gardens
not to consume but to actively create, not to escape from reality but to observe it closely. In doing this they experience the connectedness of creation and the profoundest sources of being. That the world we live in and the activity of making it are one seamless whole is something that we may occasionally glimpse. In the garden, we know."
- Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life, 1998
"We may talk what we
please," he cries in his enthusiasm for the oldest of the arts, "of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles, in fields d'or or d'argent; but, if heraldry were guided by reason, a plough in a field arable would be the most noble and ancient arms."
- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667),
Of Agriculture,
1650
Months and Seasons
Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Verses, Lore, Myths, Holidays
Celebrations, Folklore, Reading, Links, Quotations
Information, Weather, Gardening Chores
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
"A garden is a delight to the eye and
a solace for the soul."
- Sadi
"I'll plant and water, sow and weed,
Till not an inch of earth shows brown,
And take a vow of each small seed
To grow to greenness and renown:
And then some day you'll pass my way,
See gold and crimson, bell and star,
And catch my garden's soul, and say:
"How sweet these cottage gardens are!" "
- Edith Nesbit, the poem Seed-Time and Harvest from the Pomander of Verse, 1895
"There is no spot of ground, however
arid, bare or ugly,
that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression
of beauty and delight."
- Gertrude Jekyll
"Half the interest of a garden is the
constant exercise of the imagination."
- Alice Morse Earle, 1897,
Pot-Pourri from a Surrey
Garden
"I shall only instance in one delight
more, the most natural and best-natured of all others, a perpetual companion of the husbandman; and that is, the satisfaction of looking round about him, and seeing nothing but the effects and improvements of his own art and diligence; to be always gathering of some fruits of it, and at the same time to
behold others ripening, and others budding: to see all his fields and gardens covered with the beauteous creatures of his own industry; and to see, like God, that all his works are good."
- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667),
Of Agriculture,
1650
"Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome."
- Emily Dickinson, No. 324, St. 1, 1862
"We men of Earth have here the stuff
Of Paradise - we have enough!
We need no other stones to build
The Temple of the Unfulfilled -
No other ivory for the doors -
No other marble for the floors -
No other cedar for the beam
And dome of man's immortal dream.
Here on the paths of every-day -
Here on the common human way
Is all the stuff the gods would take
To build a Heaven, to mold and make
New Edens. Ours is the stuff sublime
To build Eternity in time!"
- Edwin Markham, Earth is Enough
"Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who
made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!"
- Rudyard Kipling, The Glory of the Garden
"There is more pleasure in making a
garden than in contemplating a paradise."
- Anne Scott-James
"I do not understand how anyone can
live without one small place of enchantment to turn to."
- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
"A garden is the best alternative
therapy."
- Germaine Greer
"There be delights that will fetch the day about from sun to sun and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream ... For a garden is Arcady brought home. It is man's bit of gaudy make-believe - his well-disguised fiction of an unvexed Paradise ... a world where gayety knows no eclipse and winter and rough weather are held at bay."
"In all things of nature there is something
marvelous."
- Aristotle
"Nature holds the key to our
aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive
and even spiritual satisfaction."
- Edward O. Wilson
"Gardening helps us
realize somatically, viscerally, the laws of growth and gradual unfolding.
We can't pull the plants up to make them grow, but we can help facilitate and
midwife their blooming,
each in his own way, time, and proper season. I have learned a little about
patience and humility from my gardens.
It's so obviously not something I'm doing that creates this miracle!
I also like to reflect upon and appreciate the exquisitely, evanescent,
transitory, and poignant nature of things in the garden. If you love the Dharma, you have to farm it. Go to a garden.
Just stand in it.
Breathe in the air, the fragrances,
the light, the temperature,
the music of the different plants, insects, birds, worms, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and butterflies.
Inhale the prana (cosmic energy) of all the abundantly growing things.
Recharge your inner batteries.
This is the joy of natural meditation."
- Lama Surya Das, Awakening to the Sacred, 1999
"It is only when you start a garden -
probably after age fifty -
that you realize something important happens every day."
- Geoffrey B. Charlesworth
"A little too abstract, a little too
wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again."
- Robinson Jeffers
Cloud Hands Blog Virtues and a Good Life Epicureanism How to Live a Good Life: Advice from Wise Persons
Fitness and Well Being Aging Well and Values The Ten Paramitas of Buddhism
Dharmapada Sutra of the Buddha Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu Stoicism Happiness
Green Way Research Subject Index
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
"When a man sits down in front of a
garden, or strolls around in it, he steeps himself in delight. Because the garden is a paradise where a garden owner and a landscape gardener share the same dream in their common culture. Man first made a garden to try to
produce a paradise in this world. The garden seems to be a paradise of the other world somewhere out of sight."
- Masaaki Noda, Dialogue with a Garden
"If it's drama that you sigh for,
plant a garden and you'll get it
You will know the thrill of battle
fighting foes that will beset it
If you long for entertainment and
for pageantry most glowing,
Plant a garden and this summer spend
your time with green things growing."
-
Edward A. Guest,
Plant
a Garden
"A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy."
"Gardening is the purest of human
pleasures."
- Francis Bacon
"People who love this world, people
who pay attention, are gardeners. People who are invested, people who are aware. They are gardeners
regardless of whether or not they have ever picked up a trowel. Because gardening is not just about digging. Or planting, for that
matter. Gardening is about cherishing."
- Terry Hershey, Soul Gardening
"Gardening takes a plot of land, a hoe
and willing muscles.
Scratching the soil, harvesting garden fruits, are peaceful results.
With a garden, there is hope."
- Grace Firth
"A garden is the place millions of people go
to touch the earth, to smell flowers - to use some of that fabled human brainpower in the cause of better participating with
natural processes in the place they call home. It serves as an art project, an organic
produce market, a spiritual practice, a pharmacy. It offers ongoing lessons in
ecology, biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology. Gardening imparts an organic perspective on
the passage of time. It bestows on its practitioners a genuine sense of admiration
for the plants, the soil, the sun, the water."
- Jim Nollman, Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place,
1994
"All gardeners know that in some way
they work out their problems in the garden. There is no mystery to it. They are simply following Nature's laws. Planting a garden is an act of optimism."
- Marilyn Barrett, Creating Eden
"Gardens are a form of autobiography."
"The trouble with simple living is that,
though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn't simple."
- Doris Janzen Longacre
Touching Seeing Hearing Smelling Tasting Sensing Body-Mind
Quotes for Gardeners
Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes,
Proverbs, Maxims, and
Insights
Quotes for Those Who Love
Gardens, Gardening, and the Green Way
Arranged by Over 250 Topics.
Over 18 Megabytes of Text.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
"The one small garden of a free
gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the
hands of others to command."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Sam
Gamgee
"A small garden, accordingly, gives
its owner a far greater
opportunity to express himself ... in a garden any man
may be an artist, may experiment with all the subtleties or
simplicities of line, mass, color, and composition,
and taste the god-like joys of the creator."
- H. G. Dwight,
Gardens and Gardening,
Atlantic Monthly, 1912
"If there's one thing I can say about
my garden, it can always surprise me."
- David Hobson,
The Mad Gardener
"Gardening is a way of showing that
you believe in tomorrow."
- Author Unknown
"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
"To garden, you open your personal
space to admit a few, a great many, or thousands of plants which exude charm, pleasure, beauty, oxygen, conversation, friendship, confidence, and other rewards should you succeed in meeting their basic needs. This is why people garden. It can be easy but challenging, and the rewards are priceless."
- Tom Clothier, Gardening Walk and
Talk
"How often I admire the taste shown in the garden which, within the house, may be indifferent. Here is an art which is today probably more perfect than at any previous time, one which does not break with the past, while it brings a sense of comely order, and a radiant beauty, to cottage and manor alike."
"What, if anything, do the infinity of
different traditional and individual ideas of a garden have in common? They vary so much in purpose, in size, in style and content that not even flowers, or even plants at all, can be said to be essential. In the last analysis there is only one common factor between all gardens, and this is the control of nature by man. Control, that is, for aesthetic reasons."
- Hugh Johnson
"As is the garden such is the gardener. A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds."
- Francis Bacon
"In green old gardens, hidden away
From sight of revel and sound of strife,
Here I have leisure to breathe and move,
And to do my work in a nobler way;
To sing my songs, and to say my say;
To Dream my dreams, and to love my love;
To hold my faith, and to live my life.
Making the most of its shadowy day."
- Violet Fane, 1843 - 1905, In Green Old Gardens
"The garden reconciles human art and
wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is
not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted
world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed
bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because
it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between
great extremes."
- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life,
1996
"The golden rule of gardening is to pay attention to local conditions of weather and soil."
- Carol Williams
Fruit Rain Vegetables Family Trees Flowers Ecology Sunshine
Touching Seeing Hearing Smelling Tasting Sensing Body-Mind
Spirituality Simplicity Weeding Work Clichés Pleasures
Insects Interdependence Olives Forests Herbs
"The principal value of a garden is not
understood. It is not to give the possessors vegetables and fruit (that can be better and cheaper done by the market-gardeners), but to teach him patience and philosophy, and the higher virtues - hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation."
- Charles Dudley Warner, 1829-1900
"Gardens likewise are a product of the
yearning which grows from the
humiliations and dashed hopes of daily life, and are thus the reflection
and counter-image of a more beautiful world. Designed to bridge borders,
gardens shed light on the historical reality of their creation and creators. Like all Utopias, they criticize a concrete political situation, social
relationships, constrains and shortcomings."
- Carl F. Schroer
"No sooner did I bend over and scratch the
soil with the hoe that I began to unearth bits and pieces ... of my past. Memories forever rooted in time were clustered in my
garden consciousness like potatoes, waiting, crying to be dug up. ... I plant
flowers and vegetables. I harvest memories - and life."
- Nancy H. Jordan, 1993
"Gardens are inevitably a trade-off of
successes and failures."
- Rebecca Rupp
"To own a bit of ground, to scratch it
with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do."
- Charles Dudley Warner
"How fair is a garden amid the toils
and passions of existence."
- Benjamin Disraeli
"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, 1897-1992, The Diehards, 1941
"To create a garden is to search for a
better world. In our effort to improve on nature, we are guided by a vision of paradise. Whether the result is a horticultural masterpiece or only a modest vegetable patch, it is based on the expectation of a glorious future. This hope for the future is at the heart of all gardening."
- Marina Schinz
"Man - despite his artistic
pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
- Author Unknown
"Yes, in the poor man's garden grow
Far more than herbs and flowers -
Kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind,
And Joy for weary hours."
- Mary Howitt, The Poor Man's Garden
"To dwell is to garden."
- Martin Heidegger
"Gardening adds years to your life and
life to your years."
- Author Unknown
"A Garden, an Elaboratory, a Work -
house, Improvements and Breeding, are pleasant and Profitable Diversions to the Idle and Ingenious: For here they miss Ill Company, and converse with Nature and Art; whose Variety are equally grateful and instructing; and preserve a good Constitution of Body and Mind."
- William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude In Reflections And Maxims, 1682
"To garden is to let optimism get the
better of judgment."
- Eleanor Perenyi
"Gardening is about enjoying the smell
of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity."
-
Lindley
Karstens
"I should like to enflame the whole world with my taste for gardening.
There is no virtue that I would not attribute to the man who lives to
project and execute gardens."
- Prince De Ligne
"My spirit was lifted and my soul
nourished by my time in the garden.
It gave me a calm connection with all of life, and an awareness that remains
with me now, long after leaving the garden."
- Nancy Ross
Spirituality Simplicity Weeding Work Clichés Pleasures Haiku
Months Zen History of Gardening Time Walking Fitness Grass
Fruit Rain Vegetables Family Trees Flowers Ecology Sunshine
Touching Seeing Hearing Smelling Tasting Sensing Body-Mind
Beauty Tranquility Solitude Index Cloud Hands Blog
Quotes for Gardeners
Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes,
Proverbs, Maxims, and
Insights
Quotes for Those Who Love
Gardens, Gardening, and the Green Way
Arranged by Over 250 Topics.
Over 18 Megabytes of Text.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
"May we be good to plants and flowers.
May we take fine care of
the places where they grow. Earth won't have to shake and flood
and burn so fiercely then. The world will be more wide-awake and
tuneful, a place where children - all beings - can bloom."
- Maggie Streincrohn Davis,
Glory! To the Flowers
"That small circle of earth became a
second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts."
- Paul Fleischman,
Seedfolks
"There are as many kinds of gardens as
there are gardeners, and they define themselves across sharp aesthetic and philosophical lines: utility versus beauty; vegetables versus ornamentals; chemicals versus organics; formal style versus naturalistic. Different countries breed different gardeners."
- Abby Adams, What is a Garden Anyway
"Gardeners are key land managers.
Our choices therefore lie not in whether but in how we manage the land. We would all agree that we must do it in an ecologically responsible way."
- George Seddon,
Gardening Responsibility
"Wherever man exists, he finds the
need to redesign, to recreate the world. A more beautiful world, purer, sweeter smelling and more colorful. A garden is probably the spot where the hopes for civilization are best captured. In fact, man defines himself by his garden."
- The
Enchanted Gardens of the Renaissance
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"My Grandmother standing wordless
fifteen minutes
Between rows of loganberries,
clippers poised in her hand."
- Gary Snyder,
The Old Dutch Woman
"When the world wearies, and society
ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden."
- Author Unknown
"Biophilia: the innate pleasure from
living abundance and diversity
as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens."
- Edward O. Wilson,
Consilience
"There are no green thumbs or black thumbs.
There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones 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
"A garden is the mirror of a
mind. It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year, and pressing on and pausing the whole to its own inherent rhythms."
- Henry Beston, 1935,
Herbs and the Earth
"We are stardust,
we are golden,
and we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden."
- Joni Mitchell
"One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides."
- W. E. Johns
"I suppose when it comes right down to
it, we garden because it's an old cold world, and sometimes the best a person can do is to give it children and some green things growing."
- Rebecca Rupp
"The Chinese word for garden combines
forms for soil,
landforms, a well, and an enclosure plus trees. It is generally interpreted as a man-made place for
recreation containing three elements: flowers, trees, fishpond; buildings; and, an artificial mountain."
- Chinese Landscape Gardening
"To laugh often and much, to win the respect
of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
How to Live a Good Life: Advice from Wise Persons Virtues Philosophy Spirituality Gratitude
"When gardeners garden, it is not just plants that grow, but the gardeners themselves."
- Ken Druse
"The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn."
- Wendell Berry, The Man Born to Farming, 1970
"Presently we pass to some other
object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying-out of gardens."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It occurred to me that agriculture considered as a medium does appear to have an "outside" - that is, gardening. It's true that gardening is
not the revolution, nor does gardening turn every gardener into a cultural
radical. True, but perhaps in the long run less interesting than the fact that
gardening remains
prior to and outside agriculture, and the persistence of the
garden represents some kind of dialectical negativity in relation to
agriculture. . . . But gardening is not just critique. It has a positive side. It actually produces good food and other benefits that exist outside the complex
of exchange, or at least somewhat outside. That is, gardening is
"praxis". Moreover, it is an art form, an area of creativity as rich
and promising as any symbolic activity, and one which can roughly but easily
transpire beyond the realm of representation and mediation.
It can function as
an important part of "every day life" in the radical sense of
that
term. In short, it occurred to me that perhaps the only possible avant garde is
the avant garden."
- Peter Lamborn Wilson, Avant Gardening
"How much the making of a garden, no
matter how small, adds to the joy of living, only those who practice the arts and the science can know."
- E. H. Wilson
"A garden is a love song, a duet
between a human being and Mother Nature."
- Jeff Cox
"Gardening, like sex and food, lies somewhere between art and nature,
being wholly neither but partly both."
- Roger Grounds
"My spirit
was lifted and my soul nourished by my time in the garden. It
gave me a calm connection with all of life, and an awareness that
remains with
me now, long after leaving the garden."
- Nancy Ross
" 'Green fingers' are a fact, and a
mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and love growing things."
- Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener, 1962
"As the biocentric view suggests, the
garden prospers when control is balanced by equal measures of humility and benevolence. A balance is struck. Control, servitude, respect, imagination, pragmatism, an ecological conscience, compliance, and a certain measure of mysticism and altruism, all meld together to provide nurturance."
- Jim Nollman, Why We Garden
"Who loves a garden, still his Eden
keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps."
- Amos Bronson Alcott
"A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt
or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible
destruction."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 1860
"Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the
forest and the outlaw."
- Henry David Thoreau
"The glory of the farmer is that, in
the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he
obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not,
he causes to be."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Each person's idea of a garden is
unique. In creating a garden, we not only open a door to Nature but to an ideal space, one we can control and order."
- Marilyn Barrett, Creating Eden
"A garden is an awful responsibility.
You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it."
- Charles Dudley Warner
"We eat light, drink it in through our
skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically.
I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can
order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act─there's a sweet
deliciousness to feeling yourself see something."
- James Turrell
"God is the experience
of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!""
- Joseph Campbell
"I did however used to think,
you know, in the woods walking, and as a kid playing the the woods, that there was a kind of
immanence there─ that woods, a places of that order, had a sense, a kind of presence, that you could feel; that there was something peculiarly, physically present, a feeling of place almost conscious ... like God. It evoked that."
- Robert Creely, Robert Creely and the Genius
of the American Common Place
"It is easy to suppose that few people
realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings."
- Wallace Stevens,
The Necessary
Angel
"The secret of beginning a life of deep
awareness and sensitivity lies in our willingness to pay attention. Our
growth as conscious, awake human beings is marked not so much by grand
gestures and visible renunciations as by extending loving attention to the
minutest particulars of our lives. Every relationship, every thought, every
gesture is blessed with meaning through the wholehearted attention we bring
to it. In the complexities of our minds and lives we easily forget the power
of attention, yet without attention we live only on the surface of
existence. It is just simple attention that allows us truly to listen to the
song of a bird, to see deeply the glory of an autumn leaf, to touch the
heart of another and be touched. We need to be fully present in order to
love a single thing wholeheartedly. We need to be fully awake in this moment
if we are to receive and respond to the learning inherent in it."
- Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield, Stories of the
Spirit, Stories of the Heart
"There is no language of the holy.
The sacred lies in the ordinary."
- Deng Ming-Dao
Spirituality Simplicity Weeding Work Clichés Pleasures Haiku
Months Zen History of Gardening Time Walking Fitness Grass
Fruit Rain Vegetables Family Trees Flowers Ecology Sunshine
Touching Seeing Hearing Smelling Tasting Sensing Body-Mind
Beauty Tranquility Solitude Index Cloud Hands Blog
This webpage was last updated on November 26, 2016.
This webpage was first posted to the Internet in March of 1999.
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