GardenWisdom
a page of gardening quotes
5 dollar hole for 50 cent plant.
The best way to garden is to put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and some old clothes. And with a hoe in one hand and a cold drink in the other, tell someone else where to dig.
-Texas Bix Bender
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.
-Dwight David Eisenhower
“The rake, the hoe, the shears and the broom lie at the very heart of gardening”
-Hugh Johnson
“Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that (even as his pain increases with each loss) he comprehends - truly knows - that where there was a garden once, it can be again or where there never was, there yet can be a garden so that all who see it say, ‘Well, you have favorable conditions here. Everything grows for you’. Everything grows for everybody. Everything dies for everybody, too.”
“There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises. It sounds very well to garden in a ‘natural way.’ You may see the natural way in any desert, any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell. Defiance, on the other hand, is what makes a gardener.”
-Henry Mitchell
Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time.
- William Cowper
“Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.”
- Luther Burbank
“A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us. . . . What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce.”
-Wendell Berry
We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
-Wendell Berry
Now ’tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted; Suffer them now and they’ll o’ergrow the garden.
-William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) King Henry VI, Part II, Act III
Many things love to come and live off your plants, including bacteria, bugs, birds, and bunnies. If you don’t control them, entire crops can be ruined. The result of your careful cultivation, in your garden and in your life, can be lost to predators in a short time. . . . Take a look at your life, what toxic relationships, substances and emotions are feeding on your energy and taking away from what you have to give to others. Eliminate them.
-Vivian Elisabeth Glyck
Wherever man exists, he finds the need to redesign, to recreate the world. A more beautiful world, purer, sweeter smelling and more colorful. A garden is probably the spot where the hopes for civilization are best captured. In fact, man defines himself by his garden.
-THE ENCHANTED GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE
When the world wearies, and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden.
We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.
So plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
‘The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but always grows and grows to an enduring and ever-increasing source of happiness.’
-Gertrude Jekyll
Gardens are not just case studies in design. They are stories of people’s lives.
-Michael Riley
