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A garden is a truly wonderful thing …

• How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence. Benjamin Disraeli
• Almost any garden, if you see it at just the right moment, can be confused with paradise. Henry Mitchell
• Beauty,  Flowers,  Trees,  Nature,  Life is like gardening or farming

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… a miraculous thing

• Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden. Robert Brault
• At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous. Mirabel Osler
• Every gardener knows under the cloak of winter lies a miracle… a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to light, a bud straining to unfurl. And the anticipation nurtures our dreams. Barbara Winkler
• Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof. Julie Moir Messervy
• Life is a miracle

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A garden can be a place of immense beauty …

• In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death.  Sam Llewelyn
• A garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever. Richard Briers
• Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? Douglas Adams
• Open your eyes to beauty. See the homes, the trees, the gardens.  See the shining faces of little children. Listen for the church chimes, singing birds and the laughter of happy people.  Wilferd A. Peterson
• We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening.  It makes it so lifelike.  Evelyn Underhill
• What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty. Henry Ward Beecher
• A garden is a place to feel the beauty of solitude. Bob Barnes
• Beauty

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… a place of colourful butterflies …

• She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn’t mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that. Lisa Genova, Still Alice
• No garden truly blooms until butterflies have danced upon it. D’Angelo
• Butterflies

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… of lovely birds

• I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs. Joseph Addison
• Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• As to the garden, it seems to me its chief fruit is–blackbirds. William Morris
• Birds

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… of exquisite flowers …

• A garden of roses is a fragrant piece of heaven. A garden without roses is a sorry thing.  Matthew A. R. Bassity
• A single rose can be my garden… a single friend, my world. Leo Buscaglia
• To such as these we offer, with some confidence, and with no little sympathy, our collection of choice flowers, culled from the gardens of Poesy: may they refresh the mind, and gladden the heart, and beautify the path, of many a careworn toiler in the fields of labour, of whatsoever kind. H.G. Adams
• To pick a flower is so much more satisfying than just observing it, or photographing it … So in later years, I have grown in my garden as many flowers as possible for children to pick.  Anne Scott-James
• Self-sown flowers provide a lot of serendipity, which is one of the reasons people garden. When they come up, it’s a delight. Renee Shepherd
• 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
• If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden. Claudia Ghandi
• I didn’t know the names of the flowers – now my garden is gone. Allen Ginsberg
• All the wars of the world, all the Caesars, have not the staying power of a lily in a cottage garden. Reginald Farrer
• There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals. John Ruskin
• Sometimes the tiniest flowers smell the sweetest. Emilie Barnes
• Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet. Diane Ackerman
• Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, nor a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. Walt Whitman
• Flowers are our greatest silent friends. Jim G. Brown
• What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty. Henry Ward Beecher
• I should like to enjoy this summer flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one for me. Andre Gide
• Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of nature with which she indicates how much she loves usJohann Wolfgang von Goethe
• You cannot forget, if you would, those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called “dandelions.” Henry Ward Beecher
• More than anything, I must have flowers, always, always. Claude Monet
• I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. Claude Monet
• Flowers

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… of regal trees …

• A garden without trees scarcely deserves to be called a garden. Henry Ellacombe
• He that plants trees loves others beside himself. Thomas Fuller
• Trees

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…  of musical sounds …

• There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. Minnie Aumonier
• Music

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… of beautiful smells …

• It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. Robert Louis Stevenson
• Scents bring memories, and many memories bring nostalgic pleasure. We would be wise to plan for this when we plant a garden. Thalassa Cruso
• I know that if odour were visible, as colour is, I’d see the summer garden in rainbow clouds. Robert Bridges

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A garden can be a deeply spiritual place …

• By a garden is meant mystically a place of spiritual repose, stillness, peace, refreshment, delight. John Henry Cardinal Newman
• All it takes is one bloom of hope to make a spiritual garden. Terri Guillemets
• For me the appropriate metaphor for the inner spiritual centre is a garden, a place of potential peace and tranquility. This garden is a place where the Spirit of God comes to make self-disclosure to share wisdom, to give affirmation or rebuke, to provide encouragement, and to give direction and guidance. When this garden is in proper order, it is a quiet place, and there is an absence of busyness, of defiling noise, of confusion. The inner garden is a delicate place, and if not properly maintained it will be quickly overrun by intrusive under-growth. God does not often walk in disordered gardens. And that is why inner gardens that are ignored are said to be empty. Gordon MacDonald
• I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan. Zitkala-As
• Spirituality

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… a place that restores the soul and heightens the senses …

• The simplicity of listening to a favorite CD, the calmness of soaking in a hot bath, the ease of resting on a bench at the edge of a garden: these personal spaces feed our souls, allowing us to restore our spirits and enjoy our lives. Chris Casson Madden
• The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. Hanna Rion
• The garden is where you take the time in your life to tune in and listen. It just takes being still long enough, opening your heart, opening your spirit up to what the plants have to tell you.  Gabriel Howearth
• The garden is the poor man’s apothecary. German Proverb
• Plants give us oxygen for the lungs and for the soul. Linda Solegato
• 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
• When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, There is always the garden. Minnie Aumonier
• Plants give us oxygen for the lungs and for the soul. Linda Solegato
• I don’t know how people deal with their moods when they have no garden, raspberry patch or field to work in. You can take your angers, frustrations, bewilderments to the earth, working savagely, working up a sweat and an ache and a great weariness. The work rinses out the cup of your spirit, leaves it washed and clean and ready to be freshley filled with new hope. Rachel Peden
• The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul. Thomas Moore
• My garden, with its silence and pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.  Alexander Smith
• Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul. The Koran
• The soul,  The senses

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… a place to feel connected to God …

• As a gardener, I’m among those who believe that much of the evidence of God’s existence has been planted. Robert Brault
• I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day. Frankfort Moore
• The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.  George Bernard Shaw
• One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth. Frances Gurney
• Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God. Thomas Jefferson
• God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars. Martin Luther
• Little flower, but if I could understand what you are, root and all is all, I should know what God and man is. Tennyson
• The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. Genesis 2:15
• I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology. Vigen Quoiran
• God

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… a place that restores health …

• Nature plays an important role to keep you in balance. Nature is a well-spring of energy. If you’re not near natural bush- land, try to visit a park or garden at least once in a week. Nigel Coates
• The garden is the poor man’s apothecary. German Proverb
• Lack of sunlight can make depression worse. Make sure you’re getting enough. Take a short walk outdoors, have your coffee outside, enjoy an al fresco meal, people-watch on a park bench, or sit out in the garden. Aim for at least 15 minutes of sunlight a day to boost your mood. Jeanne Segal
• From an aunt, long ago: “Death has come for me many times but finds me always in my lovely garden and leaves me there, I think, as an excuse to return.”  Robert Brault
• All my hurts my garden spade can heal. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Gardening is a kind of self-prescribed preventative medicine, good for all ills. Sheryl London
• Health,  Healing

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A garden can be a place of thoughts and dreams …

• 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
• In the garden I tend to drop my thoughts here and there. To the flowers I whisper the secrets I keep and the hopes I breathe.  I know they are there to eavesdrop for the angels.  Dodinsky
• It is good 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, Down Shoe Lane
• Yes, in the poor man’s garden grow far more than herbs or flowers– kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind, and joy for weary hours. Mary Howitt
• Dreams

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… a place for deep contemplation

• 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
• After all, Eden was garden… the garden is a place to go for quiet contemplation, a source not only of food but also of spiritual renewal and intimate contact with life’s most basic processes. Ed Smith
• Contemplation

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A garden is a place of great peace and serenity …

• There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
• 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
• Working in the garden gives me something beyond the enjoyment of the senses. It gives me a profound feeling of inner peace. Ruth Stout
• Inner peace,  Tranquility

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… especially at dawn and dusk

• We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves. Leonora Carrington
• It is good 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, Down Shoe Lane
• Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. Walt Whitman

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A garden is a place to appreciate the cycle of life and death

• When one of my plants dies, I die a little inside, too. Linda Solegato
• When you have done your best for a flower, and it fails, you have some reason to be aggrieved. Frank Swinnerton
• The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters. May Sarton
• A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. May Sarton
• In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death.  Sam Llewelyn
• On every stem, on every leaf… and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part. Oliver Wendell Holmes
• A garden that never died eventually would weary. Robbed of springtime, unacquainted with the extraordinary perfume that rises from the soil after it’s had its rest, the garden that winter doesn’t visit is a dull place.  The return every spring of earth’s first freshness would never be kept if not for the frosts and rot and ripe deaths of fall.  So when I go out from the garden for the last time in autumn, I leave the gate open behind me.  Michael Pollan
• One thing that unites all gardeners as they contemplate the compost heat is a belief in reincarnation – at least for plants. Geoffrey Charlesworth
• Death

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A garden is a place to connect with others

• Gardens and flowers have a way of bringing people together, drawing them from their homes. Clare Ansberry
• Connection,  Friendship

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A garden is a place to appreciate the seasons

• A garden that never died eventually would weary. Robbed of springtime, unacquainted with the extraordinary perfume that rises from the soil after it’s had its rest, the garden that winter doesn’t visit is a dull place.  The return every spring of earth’s first freshness would never be kept if not for the frosts and rot and ripe deaths of fall.  So when I go out from the garden for the last time in autumn, I leave the gate open behind me.  Michael Pollan
• All through the long winter, I dream of my garden. On the first day of spring, I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth. I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar. Helen Hayes
• For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad. Edwin Way Teale
• In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. Margaret Atwood
• The seasons

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A garden can be a place to plant delicious vegetables

• In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it. Frank McKinney Hubbard
• Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it.  J. Perelman
• Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden. Orson Scott Card
• Plant carrots in January and you’ll never have to eat carrots.
• 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
• Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. Wendell Berry
• A cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education. Mark Twain
• I want death to find me planting my cabbages. Michel de Montaigne
• It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a home-grown tomato. Lewis Grizzard
• Vegetarianism

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A garden can be a beautiful legacy to leave for others

• Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.  Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
• … 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 lived. This is to have succeeded. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, “In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!” John F. Kennedy
• The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world. Vita Sackville-West
• A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. Greek proverb
• Leaving a legacy

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A garden can be a great teacher

• A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. Gertrude Jekyll
• My garden is my favorite teacher. Betsy Cañas Garmon
• The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. Michael Pollan
• A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library. Henri Frederic Amiel
• The more one gardens, the more one learns; and the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows. I suppose the whole of life is like that. V. Sackville-West
• Teaching,  Learning

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A garden is all you really need

• A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in–what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars. Victor Hugo
• Garden.  Coffee.  Does a good morning need anything else?  Betsy Cañas Garmon
• Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. Walt Whitman
• With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy. Lope de Vega
• May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true. Abraham Cowley
• Human needs

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No house is really complete without a garden

• 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
• More and more, I feel the need for a house and a garden. Marie Curie
• May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true. Abraham Cowley
• A house though otherwise beautiful, yet if it hath no garden belonging to it, is more like a prison than a house. William Coles
• Home

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… though the garden doesn’t need to be a large one

• I do not envy the owners of very large gardens. The garden should fit its owner or his or her tastes, just as one’s clothes do; it should be neither too large nor too small, but just comfortable.  Gertrude Jekyll

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Gardening brings great rewards

• Fingers now scented with sage and rosemary, a kneeling gardener is lost in savory memories. SunWolf
• I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden. John Erskine
• I think I may be a better person for having given serious time and thought and effort to gardening. Martha Stewart
• To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. K. Gandhi
• Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense. Phyllis McGinley
• Most people don’t see the sun, soil, bugs, seeds, plants, moon, water, clouds, and wind the way gardeners do. Jamie Jobb

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Gardening provides much to look forward to

• One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides. E. Johns
• Every gardener knows under the cloak of winter lies a miracle… a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to light, a bud straining to unfurl. And the anticipation nurtures our dreams. Barbara Winkler
• 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. Vita Sackville-West
• A garden is never so good as it will be.
• 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
• Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.
• Gardening is an exercise in optimism.
• He who plants a tree, plants a hope.

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Gardening puts you back in touch with yourself

• One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race. Wendell Berry
• I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me. Robert Brault

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Gardening puts you back in touch with the earth

• The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope. Wendell Berry
• In the end, there is really nothing more important than taking care of the earth and letting it take care of you. Charles Scott
• We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.
• To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. Mahatma Gandhi
• Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God. Thomas Jefferson
• No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. Thomas Jefferson

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Gardening brings a sense of peace

• 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
• 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
• Inner peace

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Gardening brings a sense of perspective

• Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything – except itself. May Sarton
• An hour’s hard digging is a good way of getting one’s mind back in the right perspective. Richard Briers
• Perspective

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Gardening brings a sense of purpose and meaning

• I sit in my garden, gazing upon a beauty that cannot gaze upon itself. And I find sufficient purpose for my day.  Robert Brault
• If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. Find a happy person, and you will find a project. W. Béran Wolfe
• The work of a garden bears visible fruits–in a world where most of our labours seem suspiciously meaningless. Pam Brown
• I use the word “aim” perhaps too loosely, for I surely will have many aims in connection with every garden I attempt; the first perhaps is quite simply to leave a place more beautiful than I find it. Russell Page
• If you have two pennies, spend one on a loaf and one on a flower. The bread will give you life and the flower a reason for living. Chinese Proverb
• Purpose,  Meaning

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Gardening can bring great joy and happiness …

• If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden. Robert Brault
• I look upon the pleasure we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life. Cicero
• If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. Find a happy person, and you will find a project. W. Béran Wolfe
• I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite. Bertrand Russell
• 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
• It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth, to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season. Kate Morton
• When I go in my garden with a spade and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Those who plant gardens, plant happiness. Chinese proverb
• When I go into my garden, all the cares, perplexities, and griefs of existence, all the burdens of life slip from my shoulders and leave me with the heart of a little child that asks nothing beyond its present moment of innocent bliss. Celia Thaxter
• 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
• Joy,  Happiness

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… for it is one of life’s purest pleasures

• My garden does not whet the appetite; it satisfies it. It does not provoke thirst through heedless indulgence but slakes it by proffering its natural remedy. Amid such pleasures as these have I grown old. Epicurus
• To dig one’s own spade into one’s own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this? Beverley Nichols
• Gardening is the purest of human pleasures. Francis Bacon
• God almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. Francis Bacon
• Pleasure for one hour, a bottle of wine. Pleasure for one year a marriage; but pleasure for a lifetime, a garden. Chinese Proverb
• Pleasure

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Gardening is excellent therapy

• Gardening is the best therapy in the world. C. Z. Guest
• A garden is the best alternative therapy. Germaine Greer
• When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.
• Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes.
• Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years.

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Gardening makes you appreciate the rain

• 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.
• Rain

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Gardening is an art form

• Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas. Elizabeth Murray
• My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. Claude Monet
• A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space — a place not just set apart but reverberant — and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry. Michael Pollan
• All gardening is landscape painting. Horace Walpole
• It didn’t occur to me that… that gardening, like music, could demand practice, patience, a willingness to make mistakes. Amy Stewert
• Consult the genius of the place, that paints as you plant, and as you work. Alexander Pope
• Take thy plastic spade, It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants, They are thy colours. William Mason
• Nothing is more the child of art than a garden. Sir Walter Scott
• The true gardener, like an artist, is never satisfied. H. E. Bates
• In his garden, every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation. Louise Beebe Wilder
• In one’s garden a person may be one’s own artist without apology or explanation. Here is one spot where each may experience the “romance of possibility.  Louise Beebe Wilder
• Art

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Gardening is story telling

• Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion. Eudora Welty
• Gardens are a form of autobiography. Sydney Eddison
• “Novels and gardens,” she says. “I like to move from plot to plot.” Bill Richardson
• Stories

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Gardening is a fine pursuit in older age

• In fine weather the old gentleman is almost constantly in the garden; and when it is too wet to go into it, he will look out the window at it, by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging, and sweeping, and cutting, and planting, with manifest delight. Charles Dickens
• I’m still devoted to the garden. . . although an old man, I am but a young gardener. Thomas Jefferson
• Getting older gracefully

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Gardening requires love and passion …

• It is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about gardening. You have got to love your garden whether you like it or not.  C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman
• 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 Čapek
• I am in love with the green earth. Charles Lamb
• The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. Gertrude Jekyll
• Love,  Passion

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… even obsession …

• I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy. May Sarton
• 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
• An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life. Cora Lea Bell
• The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.  Phyllis McGinley

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… for gardening can be hard work

• Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it.
• Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration. Lou Erickson
• Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade. Rudyard Kipling
• In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it. Frank McKinney Hubbard
• What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. Charles Dudley Warner
• Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds. Gordon B. Hinckley
• The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it. John Ruskin
• A garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever. Richard Briers
• Hard work

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… and is time consuming

• I’ve noticed something about gardening. You set out to do one thing and pretty soon, you’re doing something else, which leads to some other thing, and so on. By the end of the day, you look at the shovel stuck in the half dug rose bed and wonder what on earth you’ve been doing. Anne Raver
• Where but in a garden do summer hours pass so quickly?
• If I’m ever reborn, I want to be a gardener – there’s too much to do for one lifetime! Karl Foerster

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Gardening requires the willingness to experiment and make mistakes

• It didn’t occur to me that… that gardening, like music, could demand practice, patience, a willingness to make mistakes. Amy Stewert
• There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments. Janet Kilburn Phillips
• 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 Alen
• The only thing different about having a green thumb is that you don’t get discouraged by failure. When something doesn’t work, you try again. Beth Weidner
• One day, the gardener realizes that what she is doing out there is actually teaching herself to garden by performing a series of experiments. This is a pivotal moment.   Margaret Roach
• A gardener learns more in the mistakes than in the successes. Barbara Dodge Borland
• Gardening is something you learn by doing – and by making mistakes, like cooking, gardening is a constant process of experimentation, repeating the successes and throwing out the failures. Carol Stocker
• A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. May Sarton
• Experimentation,  Mistakes

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Gardening requires green fingers and brown knees

• 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. Fred Dale
• The secret to gardening is not green fingers but brown knees.
• If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. ‘Green fingers’ are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpractised. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. Russell Page
• The only thing different about having a green thumb is that you don’t get discouraged by failure. When something doesn’t work, you try again. Beth Weidner

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Gardening requires patience

• Who has learned to garden who did not at the same time learn to be patient? L. V. Fletcher
• Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Growth takes time. Be patient. And while you’re waiting, pull a weed. Emilie Barnes
• It didn’t occur to me that… that gardening, like music, could demand practice, patience, a willingness to make mistakes. Amy Stewert
• A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. Gertrude Jekyll
• Patience

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Gardening requires constant weeding

• Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds? Chuang Tzu
• When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
• Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative’s latest example of unreasonableness. Christopher Lloyd

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Some see gardening as a tussle with nature …

• 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
• A garden is a symbol of man’s arrogance, perverting nature to human ends . . . and humans are part of nature . . . a perverse dilemma! Tim Smit
• Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden…. It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart. Nathaniel Hawthorne
• 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
• Despite the gardener’s best intentions, Nature will improvise. Michael P. Garafalo
• Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time. Ezra Pound
• Nature does not hesitate to interfere with me. So I do not hesitate to tamper with it. Henry Mitchell
• Gardening is always more or less a warfare against nature. It is true we go over to the ‘other side’ for a few hints, but we might as well abandon our spades and pitchforks as pretend that nature is everything and art nothing. James Shirley Hibberd
• Nature

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… while others see it as a kind of partnership

• 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
• Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there. Thomas Fuller
• To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes, to learn something of her choicest secrets, and to have a more intelligent interest awakened in the beautiful order of her works elsewhere. Christian Bovee
• Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. Henry David Thoreau
• The garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature. Jeff Cox
• Of course, the character of my garden is also determined by things beyond any human decision, mine or anyone else’s. Allen Lacy

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The most beautiful gardens of all are those not touched by man

• As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche.  I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens and get as near the heart of the world as I can.  John Muir
• Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings. John Muir
• Wild roses are fairest, and nature a better gardener than art. Louisa May Alcott

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Gardens and gardening are an abundant source of metaphors

• Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another. Robert Harbison
• Metaphors to live by

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Life is like a garden where you can choose to grow flowers or weeds

• A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. May Sarton
• Even too much sunshine can be devastating, while only with rain can growth occur. Accept both as part of the growing process in the garden of life. Donald S. Neviaser
• Life is a garden. It is an opportunity. You can grow weeds, you can grow roses; it all depends on you. Osho
• Your life is your garden, your thoughts are the seeds. If your life isn’t awesome, you’ve been watering the weeds.  Terry Prince
• We’re all assigned a piece of garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform. Our corner of the universe is our own life- – our relationships, our homes, our work, our current circumstances– exactly as they are.  Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity, perfectly planned by the Holy Spirit, to teach love instead of fear.  Marianne Williamson
• Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path. Jean Anouilh
• Life as gardening,  Flowers

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The world is a garden that we must cultivate with love and compassion …

• If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
• If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring. Oscar Wilde
• Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same. Helen Keller
• We are all here to serve in our own unique ways and to give back to the earth and to life what we have been given. We are here to contribute the one thing that makes us immortal: love.  We cannot hold on to the tree of life forever and we cannot live forever through our actions.  But if we act out of love, the sacrifices we perform will sustain those who come after us, and our garden will have many beautiful trees.  When we each make the choice to serve, no one will suffer because of someone else’s desires.  No tree will go without nourishment or be cut down to fulfill someone else’s wants. Our garden will flourish because each seed will have rich soil and each leaf will be free to display its beautiful colors for all to see. It will be an awesome garden that will make the front page of every newspaper.  Bernie Siegel
• Love,  Compassion

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.. with forgiveness and trust …

• Take a walk through the garden of forgiveness and pick a flower of forgiveness for everything you have ever done. When you get to that time that is now, make a full and total forgiveness of your entire life and smile at the bouquet in your hands because it truly is beautiful. Stephen Richards
• Before anything can be planted, the soil must be ready. We must allow the softening mulch of God’s forgiveness to give air and breath to the soil of our hearts.  Prejudices—taught in our childhood or imposed by our society—must be released.  Fear must be replaced by trust, and suspicion by childlike hope and acceptance.  These changes in the soil will not come easily or without sweat, but any good gardener knows that preparing the soil is the most important of all labors.  It gives the seeds a chance to grow and eventually, to exhibit all that is hidden in its complex genetic structure. Peggy Benson
• Forgiveness,  Trust

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… with understanding …

• To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed – – that can make life a garden.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Understanding

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We are all multi-coloured flowers in the garden of life

• For me, the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree. Therefore, they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect. Mahatma Gandhi
• Must you know that yours will be the “better” picture before you pick up the brush and paint? Can it not simply be another picture? Another expression of beauty? Must a rose be “better” than an iris in order to justify its existence? I tell you this: you are all flowers in the Garden of the Gods. Neale Donald Walsch
• We are all flowers in the Great Spirit’s garden. We share a common root, and the root is Mother Earth.  The garden is beautiful because it has different colors in it, and those colors represent different traditions and cultural backgrounds. David Monongye
• Flowers

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Cultivate your relationships like a garden

• A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these minds love one another the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden. But if these minds get out of harmony with one another it is like a storm that plays havoc with the garden. Gautama Buddha
• A single rose can be my garden… a single friend, my world. Leo Buscaglia
• Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. Jackson Brown
• Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing. Jim Rohn
• Friends are the flowers in the garden of life, beginning with a seed of trust, nurtured with laughter and tears, growing into loyalty and love. Nishan Panwar
• Let us be grateful to people who make us happy — they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Marcel Proust
• Principles for healthy relationships

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Cultivate your mind like a garden by planting flowers and removing weeds

• A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein and will continue to produce their kind. James Allen
• May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it’s nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen’s health. Your mind is not a cage. It’s a garden. And it requires cultivating. Libba Bray
• You have now learned that the mind is like a fertile garden and for it to flourish, you must nurture it daily. Never let the weeds of impure thought and action take the garden of your mind. Stand guard at the gateway of your mind. Keep it healthy and strong—it will work miracles in your life if you will only let it. Robin Sharma
• You are now in the additional business of mental gardening: choosing the seeds or imprints you want to put in your mind by studying which imprints create the things you want to achieve—consciously planting those seeds, and then sitting back to enjoy the extraordinary success that will come to you. Geshe Michael Roach
• The garden of the world has no limits, except in your mind. Rumi
• The mind is nothing less than a garden of inestimable value which man should strive to cultivate. William Scott Downey
• Our minds work like a garden. It is fertile ground that accepts any and everything we plant. Good or evil, constructive or destructive, our lives will bear the fruit of the seeds we plant in our minds. Ivanla Vanzant
• My mind is a garden. My thoughts are the seeds. My harvest will be either flower or weeds. Mel Weldon
• A well-kept garden filled with flowers has no room left for weeds to share; the mind keeps out unworthy thoughts when loveliness is dwelling there. Leona Bold Martin
• The mind is a bit like a garden. If it isn’t fed and cultivated, weeds will take it over. Erwin G. Hall
• Memories are like a garden. Regularly tend the pleasant blossoms and remove the invasive weeds. Linda Fifer Ralphs
• When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles. Horace Walpole
• Flowers

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Cultivate your soul

• A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life. James Allen
• After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much, so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure. That you really are strong and you really do have worth and you learn and you learn… Veronica A. Shoffstall
• All it takes is one bloom of hope to make a spiritual garden. Terri Guillemets
• Every soul innately yearns for stillness, for a space, a garden where we can till, sow, reap, and rest, and by doing so come to a deeper sense of self and our place in the universe. Silence is not an absence but a presence. Not an emptiness but repletion A filling up. Anne Leclaire
• Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. May Sarton
• To live a spiritual life, we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward- reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play. Henri J.M. Nouwen
• There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul’s garden, which I love to have watered once a week. Oliver Wendell Holmes
• The soul

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Cultivate your heart

• May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers. Thich Nhat Hanh
• What brings the karmic result from the patterns of our actions is not our action alone. As we intend and then act, we create karma: so another key to understanding the creation of karma is becoming aware of intention. The heart is our garden, and along with each action there is an intention that is planted like a seed. The result of the patterns of our karma is the fruit of these seeds. Jack Kornfield
• The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there? Jack Kornfield
• The heart

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Cultivate your feelings

• We cultivate our feelings the way we cultivate a garden: we can’t entirely prevent weeds from coming up, but we can take care to remove them before they do much harm. Phillip Cary
• Emotions

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Cultivate your personal growth

• Just as you would not neglect seeds that you planted with hope that they will bear vegetables and fruits and flowers, so you must attend to nourish the garden of your becoming. Jean Houston
• You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain and learn to accept it, not as a curse or punishment but as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
• A person’s character and their garden both reflect the amount of weeding that was done during the growing season.
• Pruning hurts. Pruning helps you grow. Emilie Barnes
• Growth takes time. Be patient. And while you’re waiting, pull a weed. Emilie Barnes
• Growth

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Cultivate your life force and creativity by providing the right conditions for it

• People can learn to study their life force in the same way that a master gardener studies a rosebush. No gardener ever made a rose.  When its needs are met a rosebush will make roses. Gardeners collaborate and provide conditions which favor this outcome.  And as anyone who has ever pruned a rosebush knows, life flows through every rosebush in a slightly different way.  Rachel Naomi Remen
• We plant, water, and weed the seeds of creativity, but we don’t have the power to make them grow, let alone grow according to our schedule. How it all unfolds is up to God. God’s wisdom will fulfil our deepest intentions once we set them in motion. Our part is to create the perfect conditions for the Universe to flow through us—much like our job is to create the perfect conditions for the garden to grow—but that’s all we can do. God flows through us and develops our gardens according to his own timetable. And thank goodness for that, because God knows and grows better than we do. Sonia Choquette Williamson

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Cultivate each day by planting seeds for the future

• A day is Eternity’s seed, and we are its Gardeners. Erika Harris
• Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. Robert Louis Stevenson
• We are always in the business of gardening for the future. Geshe Michael Roach
• Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later. Og Mandino
• The future

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Enjoy the roses at your feet

• One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon – instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. Dale Carnegie
• Don’t let the tall weeds cast a shadow on the beautiful flowers in your garden. Steve Maraboli
• Live in the moment

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More garden metaphors

• A man of words and not deeds, Is like a garden full of weeds. Nursery rhyme
• A person’s character and their garden both reflect the amount of weeding that was done during the growing season.
• Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend…when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present–love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure – the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth. Sarah Ban Breathnach
• Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. Henry David Thoreau
• Cultivate your own garden and let go of your tendency to examine and judge how others cultivate theirs. Wayne Dyer
• However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.  Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.  Things do not change, we change.  Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.  Henry David Thoreau
• I travel the garden of music, through inspiration. It’s a large, very large garden, seen? Peter Tosh
• 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
• No one lives on the top of the mountain. It’s fine to go there occasionally —for inspiration, for new perspectives. But you have to come down. Life is lived in the valleys. That’s where the farms and gardens and orchards are, and where the plowing and the work is done. That’s where you apply the visions you may have glimpsed from the peaks. Arthur Gordon
• Sadness is but a wall between two gardens. Kahlil Gibran
• So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive. Desiderius Erasmus
• The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. K. Chesterton
• Happiness grows at our own firesides and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens. Douglas Jerrold
• Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road. Margaret Atwood

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Advice for gardening

• Don’t wear perfume in the garden – unless you want to be pollinated by bees. Anne Raver
• Gardens should be like lovely, well-shaped girls: all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises and then still more curves.  H.E. Bates
• Grow what you love. The love will keep it growing. Emilie Barnes
• To get the best results you must talk to your vegetables. Prince Charles
• With plants, persuasion is better than force. Elsa Bakalar

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Thoughts on herbs

• Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. Henry David Thoreau
• However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.  Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.  Things do not change, we change.  Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.  Henry David Thoreau
• Yes, in the poor man’s garden grow far more than herbs or flowers– kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind, and joy for weary hours. Mary Howitt
• An established herb becomes an heirloom, for in all likelihood, it will outlive the gardener who plants it. Elizabeth Lawrence
• An herb is a weed you can eat. Bartell Desmond
• Herbs are the friend of the physician and the pride of cooks. Charlemagne
• Herbs don’t point a finger. If they live, they don’t carry grudges. If they die, unless you’ve killed an entire species or a rain forest, you feel only momentary guilt, which is quickly replaced by a philosophical, smug feeling: failure is enriching to your compost pile. Ann Raver
• I am convinced that weeds are just herbs we’ve not found a use for yet. Tristan Gylberd
• Why is it that frost hurts not the most unnecessary of weeds, but only the most necessary of herbs? Thomas Fuller

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Thoughts on pruning

• All gardens, even the most native and naturalistic, benefit from the hand of an artful pruner. In this season where the garden is poised for the green flood of springtime, remember that our gardens are co-creations, shared with mother earth. And like any good mother, she expects you to tidy up your room. Tom Spencer
• Pruning hurts. Pruning helps you grow. Emilie Barnes

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Thoughts about weeds

• I am convinced that weeds are just herbs we’ve not found a use for yet. Tristan Gylberd
• A weed is a plant that is not only in the wrong place, but intends to stay, displacing the plant that is in the right place, but is uncertain as to whether it is or it ought. Harold Germaine
• Why is it that frost hurts not the most unnecessary of weeds, but only the most necessary of herbs? Thomas Fuller
• A weed is a plant that is not only in the wrong place but intends to stay. Sara Stein
• The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds. Plutarch
• Growth takes time. Be patient. And while you’re waiting, pull a weed. Emilie Barnes
• No garden is without weeds. Thomas Fuller
• A weed is no more than a flower in disguise. James Russell Lowell
• I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden… Dudley Warner
• Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? Henry David Thoreau

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• 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
• Don’t wear perfume in the garden – unless you want to be pollinated by bees. Anne Raver
• Gardening is man’s effort to improve his lot.
• God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.
• You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.
• Won’t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.  Richard Sheridan
• I speak to my flowers. I’ve learned to speak fluent Geranium.
• Plant carrots in January and you’ll never have to eat carrots.
• When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
• Your first job is to prepare the soil. The best tool for this is your neighbor’s garden tiller. If your neighbor does not own a garden tiller, suggest that he buy one.  Dave Barry
• Gardening requires lots of water… most of it in the form of perspiration. Lou Erickson
• Nature does not hesitate to interfere with me. So I do not hesitate to tamper with it. Henry Mitchell
• One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria. Christopher Fry
• Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden. Orson Scott Card
• Love your neighbour yet pull not down your hedge. George Herbert
• When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant. Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it.
• You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt. I’m not really a career person. I’m a gardener, basically.  George Harrison
• I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden… I name things as I find them. Charles Dudley Warner
• A cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education. Mark Twain
• As to the garden, it seems to me its chief fruit is–blackbirds. William Morris
• A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. Frank Lloyd Wright
• A garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever. Richard Briers
• 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
• 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
• My garden will never make me famous, I’m a horticultural ignoramus. Ogden Nash

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