To live is so startling it leaves
little time for anything else.
- Emily Dickinson
Gardeners , like everyone else, live
second by second and minute by minute. What we see at one particular moment is then
and there before us. But there is a second way of seeing. Seeing with the eye
of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone
by.
- Allen Lacy, The Gardener's Eye, 1992, p. 16
One Old Druid's Final Journal: Notebooks of the Librarian of Gushen Grove
Spring passes and one remembers one's
innocence
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.
- Yoko Ono, Season of Glass
To these delights of a garden, age may add a
further interest which can hardly be distinguished from beauty, for the mind, at least
with those who have the historic instinct, is always longing to be connected with the
past, and dreading for itself confinement upon the plane of time, delights in evidences of
the long continuance of nations, families and institutions, in hale and vigorous old age,
in long-settled peace beyond the turn of Fortune's wheel, the 'scornful dominion of
accident.' Restfulness is the prevailing note of an old garden; in this fairy world
of echo and suggestion where the Present Age never comes but to commune with the Past, we
feel the glamour of a Golden Age, of a state of society just and secure which has grown
and blossomed as the rose.
- Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909
Because we don't think about future
generations,
they will never forget us.
- Henrik Tikkanen
Men talk of killing time, while time
quietly kills them.
- Dion Boucicault
Suddenly, as rare things will,
it vanished.
-Elizabeth Barret Browning
Tis an old dial with many a stain;
In summer crowned with drifting orchard bloom,
Tricked in the autumn with the yellow rain,
And white in winter like a marble tomb.
And round about its gray, time-eaten brow
Lean letters speak - a worn and shattered row:
I am a Shade: A Shadowe too arte thou:
I marke the Time: saye, Gossip, dost thou soe?
- Austin Dobson, The Sundial, 1900
Winter is an etching, spring a
watercolor, summer an oil painting
and autumn a mosaic of them all.
- Stanley Horowitz
When Time who steals our years away
Shall steal our pleasures too,
The mem'ry of the past will stay,
And half our joys renew.
- Thomas Moore, 1779-1852
Forty is about the age for unexpected
developments: extroverts turn introspective,
introverts become sociable, and everyone, without regard to type, acquires
grey hairs and philosophies of life. Many also acquire gardens.
- Janice Emily Bowers, A Full Life in a Small Place, 1993
The gardening season officially
begins on January 1st and ends on December 31.
- Marie Huston
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
The future is like the daytime moon,
a diffident but faithful companion,
so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.
- Robert Grudin
Home and Gardens: Our Sense of Place
It's not over until it's over.
-Yogi Berra
To be interested in the changing
seasons is a happier state
of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
- George Santayana
As if you could kill time
without injuring eternity.
- Henery David Thoreau
Half the interest of a garden is the constant
exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months
hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good
gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is
fatal.
- Alice Morse Earle, 1897
Memory is the power to gather roses in winter.
We must wait until the evening to see
how splendid the day had been.
– Sophocles
Life isn't a matter of milestones but of
moments.
- Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
"If" is a word that has
humbled many gardeners.
But it hasn't made us quit.
- Katherine Endicott
Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies - alas! how soon he dies!
- Samuel Johnson. 1709-1784, Winter. An Ode
What is history but a fable agreed
upon?
- Napoleon Bonaparte
So fades a summer cloud away;
So sinks the gale when storms are o'er;
So gently shuts the eye of day;
So dies a wave along the shore.
- Mrs. Barbauld, 1743-1825, The Death of the Virtuous
Oh, tell me how my garden grows,
Where I no more may take delight,
And if some dream of me it knows,
Who dream of it by day and night.
- Mildred Howells, 1872-1966
Slow down and everything you are
chasing
will come around and catch you.
- John De Paola
There is nothing permanent except
change.
- Heraclitus
Some reckon time by stars,
And some by hours;
Some measure days by dreams
And some by flowers;
My heart alone records
My days and hours.
- Madison J. Cawein
When planning for a year, plant corn.
When planning for a decade, plant trees.
When planning for life, train and educate people.
- Chinese Proverb
This narrow isthmus 'twixt two
boundless seas,
The past, the future: - two eternities!
- Thomas Moore, 1779-1852, Lalla Rookh: The Veiled Prophet
of Khorassan.
Prediction is very difficult,
especially about the future.
- Niels Bohr
It has become fashionable to be old-fashioned in the garden.
- Leonard H. Robbins
I prefer winter and fall, when you
feel the bone structure of the
landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter.
Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show.
- Andrew Wyeth
In any weather, at any hour of the
day or night, I have been anxious to improve
the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too: to stand on the meeting of two
eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment;
to toe that line.
- Henry David Thoreau
Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!
John Milton, The Hour of Death
... the spring, the summer,
The chilling autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
All the flowers of all the tomorrows
are in the seeds of today and yesterday.
- Chinese proverb
For after all what is man in nature?
A nothing in relation to infinity, all in
relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely
far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings
are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is
equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was
drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
- Blaise Pascal
The mills of God grind slowly but
they grind finely.
- Irish Proverb
Never do today what you can put off
till tomorrow.
- Mathew Browne
Thou hast set all the borders of the
earth:
thou hast made summer and winter.
- Psalms 74:17
Tomorrow is the busiest day of the
year.
- Spanish Proverb
Some things arrive in their own
mysterious hour, on their
own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.
- Gail Goodwin
Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn's soberer time.
- Thomas Moore
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by Over 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Whatever else seems pleasant at first
apprehension, at length becomes dull by too long acquaintance. But the pleasures of
a Garden are every day renewed. A Garden is the only complete delight the world
affords, ever complying with our various and mutable Minds.
- Author Unknown
Time is something everyone runs short on and finally runs
out of.
- Mike Garofalo
Time is a great teacher, but
unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Hector Louis Berlioz
I never think of the future.
It comes soon enough.
- Albert Einstein
Anyone who thinks that gardening
begins in the spring and ends in the
fall is missing the best part of the whole year. For gardening begins in
January, begins with the dream.
- Josephine Nuese, 1970, The Country Garden
There is no present or future, only
the past,
happening over and over again, now.
- Eugene O'Neill
God gave us memories, that we might
have June roses in the December of our lives.
- James M. Barrie
Everyone has his day and some days
last longer than others.
- Winston Churchill
What a dead thing is a clock, with
its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass,
its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like
structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden
god
of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its
business-use
be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have
pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not
protracted after sunset, of temperance, and good hours. It was the
primitive clock, the horologue of the first world.
Adam could scare have missed it in Paradise.
- Charles Lamb, Essays, 1823
The butterfly counts not months but
moments, and has time enough.
- Rabindranath Tagore
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is
forever.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishin
in. I drink at it, but while
I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
- Henry David Thoreau
Even God cannot change the past.
- Agathon
The future is like heaven, everyone
exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
- James Baldwin
Years following years steal something
every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.
- Alexander Pope, 1688-1744
I come like Water, and like Wind I
go.
- Edward Fitzgerald
With time and patience the mulberry
leaf becomes a silk gown.
- Chinese Proverb
Summer, fall, winter, spring,
The seasons rotate as each brings
its special beauty to this earth of ours.
Winters' snow and Summers' flowers
Frozen rivers will flow come spring,
There is a renewal of everything.
- Edna Frohock
Time is the longest distance between
to places.
- Tennessee Williams
In times like these, it helps to
recall that there have always been times like these.
- Paul Harvey
Finally, I realized what makes my
garden exciting is me. Living in it every day,
participating minutely in each small event, I see with doubled and redoubled vision.
Where friends notice a solitary hummingbird pricking the salvia flowers, I recall
a season's worth of hummingbird battles.
- Janice Emily Bowers, A Full Life in a Small Place, 1993
At times I think and at times I
am.
- Paul Valery
The trouble with out times is that
the future is not what it used to be.
- Paul Valery
Spring comes with flowers, autumn
with the moon,
summer with the breeze, winter with snow.
When idle concerns don't fill your thoughts,
that's your best season.
- Wu Men
It is necessary to write, if the days
are not to slip emptily by. How else,
indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment
passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where
the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on
the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth
of the soul, growth of the mind.
- Vita Sackville-West
If you don't have time to do it right, you must have time to do it over.
"In Western languages the names
of the four seasons became complete only
a few centuries ago. Words for winter and summer appear quite early but
in English "spring" came to be used as the name of the season as late as
the
sixteenth century, and in German 'fruhjahr', "spring" appeared about the
same
time. Similarly, in India "hemanta(winter) and vasanta(spring)" appear in
Sanskrit literature very early, while other seasonal terms come much later."
- The
Importance of Season Words
The gardener's work is never at at end; it
begins with the year, and continues
to the next: he prepares the ground, and then he sows it; after that he plants,
and then he gathers the fruits....
- John Evelyn, Kalendarium Hortense, 1706
There was a time when meadow, grove and
stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore: -
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
- William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, Ode, Intimations of Immortality
Love makes time pass; time makes love
pass.
French Proverb
The future is something which
everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour,
whatever he does, whoever he is.
- Clive Staples Lewis
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions
Quips and Observations of Michael P. Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and Bibliography
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo
Awards and Recognition for this Web Site
The Mental and Spiritual Aspects of
Gardening:
Bibliography and Resources
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, 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
References and Links
Time and the Art of Living. By Robert Grudin. New York, Ticknor & Fields, 1982. 189 pages.
The four seasons in classical music compositions. By Kelly Ferjutz.
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
Time, Seasons: Quotes for Gardeners. Version 4.7
The History of Gardening Timeline