Garden Quotes:

Gardening has a magical quality when you are a child.

source: Barbara Damrosch (2003). “The Garden Primer”, p.2, Rodale

topic: Garden, Thinking, Magic

Far more gardens fail because the gardener is absent or not paying attention than because he or she lacks erudition. Yes, you need to know your ABCs [the basics], but the more you garden, the more you'll learn what works and what doesn't.

source: Barbara Damrosch (1982). “Theme Gardens”, Workman Publishing Company

topic: Children, Garden, Gardening, Flowers And Gardens

Good gardening is very simple, really. You just have to learn to think like a plant.

topic: Garden, Needs, Attention, Erudition

I love medieval cities; they do not clamor for attention; they possess their souls - their riches - in quiet; formal, courteous, they reveal themselves slowly, stone by stone, garden by garden; hidden treasures wait calmly to be loved and yield to introspective wandering.

source: Barbara Damrosch (2003). “The Garden Primer”, p.18, Rodale

topic: Simple, Garden, Thinking

- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

topic: Travel, Garden, Yield, Courteous, Hidden Treasure

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

topic: Beautiful, Garden, Childhood

This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.

- Barbara Kingsolver

topic: Spring, Garden, June, Roasting

She set about preparing her supper. It would have to be one of those classically simple meals, the sort that French peasants are said to eat and that enlightened English people sometimes enjoy rather self-consciously - a crusty French loaf, cheese, and lettuce and tomatoes from the garden. Of course there should have been wine and a lovingly prepared dressing of oil and vinegar, but Dulcie drank orange squash and ate mayonnaise that came from a bottle.

- Barbara Pym

topic: Wine, Simple, Garden, Mayonnaise, Oil And Vinegar

Should it not be remembered that in setting a garden we are painting a picture?

- Beatrix Farrand

topic: Garden, Painting, Should, Painting A Picture

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.

- Beatrix Potter

source: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

topic: Garden, Names, Once Upon A Time

Don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.

- Beatrix Potter

source: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

topic: Father, Garden, Pie

I also like to garden. I grow things, vegetables, flowers... I particularly like orchids. I raise orchids.

- Beau Bridges

source: "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Flower, Garden, Vegetables

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

- Ben Aaronovitch

topic: Garden, Tree, Parks, Modern Architecture, Landscaping

How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.

- Benjamin Disraeli

topic: Passion, Garden, Toil

...This large and expensive stock of drugs will be unnecessary. By...doses of...medicines...multiplying...combining them properly, 20 to 30 articles, aided by the common resources of the lancet, a garden, a kitchen, fresh air, cool water, exercise, will be sufficient to cure all the diseases that are at present under the power of medicine.

- Benjamin Rush

topic: Exercise, Dark, Garden, Dark Ages, Multiplying

The Rulers of Russia, then, are Jewish Politicians, and they are applying to the world the doctrine of Karl Marx (Mordecai). Marx, was a clear and lucid Talmudist...full of that old Hebrew (sic) materialism which ever dreams of a paradise on earth and always rejects the hope held out of the chance of a Garden of Eden after Death.

- Bernard Lazare

topic: Dream, Garden, Eden, Paradise On Earth, Garden Of Eden

You have to dream things out. It keeps a kind of an ideal before you. You see it first in your mind and then you set about to try and make it like the ideal. If you want a garden,-why, I guess you've got to dream a garden.

- Bess Streeter Aldrich

source: Bess Streeter Aldrich (1994). “A Lantern in Her Hand”, p.87, U of Nebraska Press

topic: Dream, Garden, Mind

Being in the nude isn't a disgrace unless you're being promiscuous about it. After all, when God created Adam and Eve, they were stark naked. And in the Garden of Eden, God was probably naked as a jaybird too!

- Bettie Page

source: FaceBook post by Bettie Page from Aug 17, 2012

topic: Garden, Eden, Naked, Promiscuous, Garden Of Eden

After all, he put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden naked as jaybirds!

- Bettie Page

topic: Garden, Eden, Naked, Garden Of Eden

To dig one's own spade into one's own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?

I had never 'taken a cutting' before ... Do you realize that the whole thing is miraculous? It is exactly as though you were to cut off your wife's leg, stick it in the lawn, and be greeted on the following day by an entirely new woman, sprung from the leg, advancing across the lawn to meet you.

source: Beverley Nichols (2009). “Rhapsody in Green: The Garden Wit and Wisdom of Beverley Nichols”, p.17, Timber Press

topic: Life, Garden, Earth, Spades

A garden without cats, it will be generally agreed, can scarcely deserve to be called a garden at all.

topic: Taken, Cutting, Garden

A gardener is never shut out from his garden, wherever he may be. Its comfort never fails. Though the city may close about him, and the grime and soot descend upon him, he can still wander in his garden, does he but close his eyes.

source: Beverley Nichols (1968). “Garden open tomorrow”, Butterworth-Heinemann

topic: Cat, Garden, Deserve, Green Eyes

A garden is a place for shaping a little world of your own according to your heart's desire.

source: Beverley Nichols (1932). “Down the garden path”, Doubleday, Doran & co., inc.

topic: Eye, Garden, Cities, Grime

A garden without cats, it will be generally agreed, can scarcely deserve to be called a garden at all...much of the magic of the heather beds would vanish if, as we bent over them, there was no chance that we might hear a faint rustle among the blossoms, and find ourselves staring into a pair of sleepy green eyes.

source: Beverley Nichols (2009). “Rhapsody in Green: The Garden Wit and Wisdom of Beverley Nichols”, p.123, Timber Press

topic: Heart, Garden, Desire

If we can have a fast food restaurant on almost every corner, then we can certainly have a garden.

topic: Cat, Eye, Garden

- Bill de Blasio

topic: Garden, Fast Food, Fast Food Restaurants

We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.

- Bill McKibben

topic: Sweet, Garden, Biodiversity, Greenhouses

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

- Bill Mollison

source: "An introduction to permaculture". Book by Bill Mollison, 1991.

topic: Garden, Needs, Shelter, Productions, Systemic Change

I walk my dogs. I garden a little. I play a bit of tennis. Basically when I have spare time I'm making music.

- Bill Mumy

topic: Dog, Garden, Play, Spare Time

"Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot."

- Bill Richardson

topic: Moving, Garden, Plot

If Everton were playing down the bottom of my garden, I'd draw the curtains.

- Bill Shankly

source: Quoted in Colin Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

topic: Garden, Curtains, Draws, Everton

Perhaps you have noticed that even in the very lightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit, for not only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him continually in differing ways.

- Black Elk

topic: Prayer, Men, Garden

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

- Blaise Pascal

topic: Nature, Math, Garden, Environmental Stewardship

Our devotional life with God is more like the planting of a garden. When we arise from sowing into the secret place, we will not usually be able to point to immediate results or benefits. What we sow today will require an entire season of growth before the results are manifest.

- Bob Sorge

topic: Garden, Secret, Growth, Secret Places, Devotional

How unthinkable that, in a country of such bursting plenty, so many people are facing ongoing hunger and poverty. If we are truly each other's keepers, let's support school lunches, food stamps, neighborhood garden projects, and so many other wonderful programs working to put an end to this cruel and needless blight once and for all.

- Bonnie Raitt

topic: Country, School, Garden, Hunger And Poverty, Hunger Poverty

I just go in my back garden. It's the only place where people don't come and bother you.

- Boy George

topic: Garden, People, Bother

But I believe that there are marriages where you can have your pool table and she can have her scrapbooking room or garden or whatever it is. But when everyone has what they want, it's not funny. There's no conflict.

- Brad Garrett

topic: Believe, Garden, Scrapbooking, Pool Table

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

- Brad Warner

topic: Garden, Light, Tree, Zen Master, Light Bulb

everyone who is human has something to express. Try not expressing yourself for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter, or draw a picture, or sing, or make a dress or a garden.

- Brenda Ueland

topic: Communication, Writing, Garden

I like to go for a walk or swimming or in the garden when I can. It's a busy kind of life, but I guess I'm lucky.

- Brian May

topic: Swimming, Garden, Lucky

Mary is the lily in God's garden.

- Bridget of Sweden

topic: Garden, Lilies, Mary

When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him.

- Brigham Young

topic: Father, Garden, Eden

Peter stood, cleared his throat, and began to hum softly, then sing, slowly building up the song as his voice cleared. He found the old tune, the song of the Sunbird. And as he sung, as his rich voice echoed off the tall cliffs, the birds and the faeries lent him their voice and soon the tune drifted throughtout the garden.

- Brom

topic: Song, Garden, Voice

The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants.... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes.

- Bronislaw Malinowski

source: Myth in Primitive Psychology ch. 5 (1926)

topic: Notebook, Beach, Garden, Informants, Planters

One constant in a world of variables - a man alone in the evening in his patch of vegetables. and all the things he takes down with him there, where the easement runs along the back fence.

- Bruce Dawe

source: Bruce Dawe (1971). “Condolences of the season: selected poems”, Addison-Wesley Professional

topic: Running, Men, Garden

Through consciousness, our minds have the power to change our planet and ourselves. It is time we heed the wisdom of the ancient indigenous people and channel our consciousness and spirit to tend the garden and not destroy it.

- Bruce H. Lipton

source: "Has Modern Science Bankrupted Our Souls?" by Bruce Lipton, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 2, 2011.

topic: Garden, People, Mind, Indigenous People

Our marriage is like anybody's marriage, It goes through ups and downs. It's a little garden that you have to tend all the time. When we're home, it's not like we walk around all dolled up going, We are celebrities! We are famous! I change diapers. I clean up dog doo.

- Bruce Willis

topic: Dog, Home, Garden

It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' [everything]. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Garden, Trying, Use

The Calormens have dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people. They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments all about the fountains of prosperity irrigating the gardens of prudence and virtue --and things like that-- but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Wise, Dark, Garden, Turbans

Gardening is the best therapy in the world.

- C. Z. Guest

topic: Garden, Gardening, World

I call myself, 'The Estee Lauder of the garden world.' I'm my own little conglomerate.

- C. Z. Guest

topic: Garden, World, Littles

I've always felt that having a garden is like having a good and loyal friend.

- C. Z. Guest

topic: Garden, Loyal, Loyal Friend

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.

- C.P. Snow

topic: Fall, Eye, Garden, Medley, Periodic Table

He plants to benefit another generation.

- Caecilius Statius

topic: Garden, Generations, Benefits

There is a tale...It tells of the days when a blight hung over our land. Nothing prospered. Nothing flourished. Not even zucchini would grow.

- Cameron Dokey

topic: Garden, Zucchini, Land

When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left.

- Camille Claudel

topic: Beach, Garden, Ideas, Your Room

I want to live my life naked, with all my little naked kids naked in the garden.

- Candice Swanepoel

topic: Kids, Garden, Naked

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

- Carl Linnaeus

topic: Garden, Tree, Plant, Dead Trees, Planting A Garden

I am looking forward to continue my career in Orange & Blue and to work with Phil Jackson, a champion who builds championship teams. Madison Square Garden is the mecca of basketball and I am surrounded by the greatest fans in the world.

- Carmelo Anthony

topic: Basketball, Team, Garden, Championship Team, Madison Square Garden

Way over yonder is a place I have seen In a garden of wisdom from some long ago dream.

- Carole King

source: Song: Way Over Yonder, Album: Tapestry

topic: Dream, Garden, Long

The first painting that I realised I liked was 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch, when I was six years old, at the Prado in Madrid. I still find myself returning there every time I'm in the city.

- Carolina Herrera

topic: Garden, Years, Cities

I classify Sao Paolo this way: The Governor's Palace is the living room. The mayor's office is the dining room and the city is the garden. And the favela is the back yard where they throw the garbage.

- Carolina Maria de Jesus

source: Carolina Maria de Jesus (2005). “Beyond All Pity”

topic: Garden, Cities, Office, Dining Rooms, Favelas

Loveâ€”the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incompleteâ€”is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something.

- Caroline Knapp

topic: Sex, Garden, Giving

I plant daffodil bulbs about eight inches deep. As I mentioned before, I don't use a ruler. As a married woman, I know perfectly well what six or eight inches looks like, so it's easy to make a good estimate. This mental measurement makes planting time much more interesting than it might be otherwise.

- Cassandra Danz

topic: Garden, Eight, Interesting, Daffodil

I can't resist a pretty plant. When I see it, I want it, I buy it, take it home, and plant it where ever I can find a place. If I had a similar moral code when it comes to romance, I would be divorced several times over by now. That is the reason I grow a cottage garden. I can stick everything in with complete abandon and no discrimination whatsoever.

- Cassandra Danz

source: Cassandra Danz (1998). “Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams”, Crown

topic: Home, Garden, Romance, Moral Code

I love all the shoe shops in Covent Garden. Laura Lee Jewellery on Monmouth Street for delicate gold jewellery. Every time I get a part in an English movie, I buy myself a piece of jewellery from there.

- Caterina Murino

topic: Garden, Shoes, Gold, Laura, Jewellery

I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere -- the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible thing, and made the world between them.

- Catherynne M. Valente

topic: Lying, Book, Garden, Enticing

When in the fresh mornings I go into my garden before anyone is awake, I go for the time being into perfect happiness.

- Celia Thaxter

topic: Morning, Garden, Perfect

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

source: Celia Thaxter (2008). “An Island Garden”, p.4, Applewood Books

topic: Flower, Passion, Garden, Flowers And Gardens, Silver Spoons

The toad has indeed no superior as a destroyer of noxious insects, and he possesses no bad habits and is entirely inoffensive himself, every owner of a garden should treat him with utmost hospitality.

- Celia Thaxter

topic: Animal, Garden, Toads

In the Garden of Eden Eve showed more courage than Adam.. when the serpent offered the forbidden fruit. She knew that there was something better than paradise

- Cesare Borgia

topic: Garden, Eden, Paradise, Forbidden Fruit, Serpent

Herbs are the friend of the physician and the pride of cooks.

- Charlemagne

topic: Pride, Garden, Physicians

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

- Charles Darwin

topic: God, Garden, Thinking, Beneficence, Wasps

The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.

- Charles Darwin

topic: Men, Garden, Animal

The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among some tall old elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither my mother nor Miss Betsey could forbear glancing that way. As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind...

- Charles Dickens

topic: Mother, Nature, Garden, Elm Trees

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden... name things as I find them.

topic: Garden, Land, Cities, City Planning

A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it.

topic: Weed, Garden, Names

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.

source: Charles Dudley Warner (2006). “My Summer in a Garden: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.28, ReadHowYouWant.com

topic: Responsibility, Garden, May

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.

source: Charles Dudley Warner (2006). “My Summer in a Garden: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.1, ReadHowYouWant.com

topic: Men, Garden, Race, Planting Seeds, Planting A Garden

The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.

topic: Philosophy, Garden, Vegetables

Hoeing in the garden on a bright, soft May day, when you are not obligated to, is nearly equal to the delight of going trouting.

topic: Men, Garden, Done, Horticulture, Planting A Garden

There are those who say that trees shade the garden too much, and interfere with the growth of the vegetables. There may be something in this:but when I go down the potato rows, the rays of the sun glancing upon my shining blade, the sweat pouring down my face, I should be grateful for shade.

topic: Garden, Delight, May, May Day

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.

source: Charles Dudley Warner (2006). “My Summer in a Garden: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.17, ReadHowYouWant.com

topic: Grateful, Garden, Vegetables

- Charles Heiser

topic: Garden, Animal, Agriculture, Cultural Change

What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

- Charles Jencks

topic: Garden, Celebration, Universe

I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from.

An album is a garden, not for show Planted, but use; where wholesome herbs should grow.

topic: Retirement, Garden, Gestures

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

topic: Garden, Albums, Use

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

topic: Garden, Poetry, Simplicity