DEEP THOUGHTS ABOUT GARDENING
My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view. ~H. Fred Ale
Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration. ~Lou Erickson
What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. ~Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden, 1871
I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from and Old Manse
There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling. ~Mirabel Osler
Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it. ~Author Unknown
Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them. ~Victoria Glendinning
In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. ~Sam Llewelyn
The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. ~Hanna Rion
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
It is a good idea to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought. ~James Douglas
Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. ~Marcelene Cox
God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done. ~Author Unknown
Don't wear perfume in the garden - unless you want to be pollinated by bees. ~Anne Raver
Take thy plastic spade,
It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants,
They are thy colours.
~William Mason, The English Garden, 1782
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
Gardens are a form of autobiography. ~Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993
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, noproblemgarden.com
Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden. ~Orson Scott Card
The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. ~George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932
How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence. ~Benjamin Disraeli
I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit. ~Reginald Farrer, In a Yorkshire Garden, 1909
Gardens are not made by singing "Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade. ~Rudyard Kipling
You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt. ~Author Unknown
Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think how opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners themselves tend to be. Nobody talks much about the muscular limbs, dark, swollen buds, strip-tease trees and unholy beauty that have made us all slaves of the Goddess Flora. ~Ketzel Levine's talkingplants.com
Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. ~Alice Morse Earle, Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, 1897
No two gardens are the same. No two days are the same in one garden. ~Hugh Johnson
Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise. ~Michael P. Garafalo, gardendigest.com
Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there. ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. ~Walt Whitman
Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another. ~Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977
I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden. ~Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666
Tickle it with a hoe and it will laugh into a harvest. ~English Proverb
Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart. ~Russell Page
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 & R.J. Yeatman, Garden Rubbish, 1936
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 Èapek, The Gardener's Year, translated by M. and R. Weatherall, 1931
Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it. ~S.J. Perelman, Acres and Pains, 1951
I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error. ~Sara Stein, My Weeds, 1988
It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn't a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe nothing. ~Eleanor Perényi, Green Thoughts, 1981
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. ~Henry David Thoreau
Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed. ~Lewis Gannit
Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself. ~May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder. ~Alfred Austin
The best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow. ~Author Unknown
By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course. ~Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman, 1981
My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view. ~H. Fred Ale
Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration. ~Lou Erickson
What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. ~Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden, 1871
I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from and Old Manse
There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling. ~Mirabel Osler
Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it. ~Author Unknown
Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them. ~Victoria Glendinning
In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. ~Sam Llewelyn
The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. ~Hanna Rion
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
It is a good idea to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought. ~James Douglas
Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. ~Marcelene Cox
God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done. ~Author Unknown
Don't wear perfume in the garden - unless you want to be pollinated by bees. ~Anne Raver
Take thy plastic spade,
It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants,
They are thy colours.
~William Mason, The English Garden, 1782
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
Gardens are a form of autobiography. ~Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993
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, noproblemgarden.com
Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden. ~Orson Scott Card
The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. ~George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932
How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence. ~Benjamin Disraeli
I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit. ~Reginald Farrer, In a Yorkshire Garden, 1909
Gardens are not made by singing "Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade. ~Rudyard Kipling
You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt. ~Author Unknown
Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think how opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners themselves tend to be. Nobody talks much about the muscular limbs, dark, swollen buds, strip-tease trees and unholy beauty that have made us all slaves of the Goddess Flora. ~Ketzel Levine's talkingplants.com
Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. ~Alice Morse Earle, Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, 1897
No two gardens are the same. No two days are the same in one garden. ~Hugh Johnson
Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise. ~Michael P. Garafalo, gardendigest.com
Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there. ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. ~Walt Whitman
Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another. ~Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977
I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden. ~Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666
Tickle it with a hoe and it will laugh into a harvest. ~English Proverb
Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart. ~Russell Page
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 & R.J. Yeatman, Garden Rubbish, 1936
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 Èapek, The Gardener's Year, translated by M. and R. Weatherall, 1931
Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it. ~S.J. Perelman, Acres and Pains, 1951
I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error. ~Sara Stein, My Weeds, 1988
It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn't a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe nothing. ~Eleanor Perényi, Green Thoughts, 1981
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. ~Henry David Thoreau
Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed. ~Lewis Gannit
Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself. ~May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder. ~Alfred Austin
The best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow. ~Author Unknown
By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course. ~Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman, 1981
