Gardening Quotes

I think we put far too much interest in trying to get ten to 20 year olds interested in gardening. I think you should do everything you can to try and get them interested up to the age of 10.

A brier rose whose buds yield fragrant harvest for the honey bee.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

Rock ‘n’ Roll, no roses or gardening.

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.

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.

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.

Gardening is not a rational act.

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

I’m not surfing much anymore, but I love hiking and gardening, and I’m always wearing a hat and sunblock.

You have to get up and plant the seed and see if it grows, but you can’t just wait around, you have to water it and take care of it.

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.

If a person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Very early, I thought I would go into music, but I was aware that it would bring a set of obstacles I didn’t find particularly attractive. Also, I’m not a great performer! For a while, I thought I would do something in landscape gardening. But it was always fashion for me.

Living in New York after 14 years, I’m such an outdoors kind of person. I love gardening and building things. I like restoring old furniture.

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren’t really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

There’s something about beautiful moments in sports that alters our experience of time. And I’d say the same thing about poetry and gardening. Gardening slows me down. I want to stop and observe everything.

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

I read, go for walks and I love to garden. My hands are such a mess. People think I should have movie star hands, but they’re just gardening ones. Always slightly grubby and with a bit of dirt under the fingernails.

I don’t think about being the Colin Firth of the gardening world. I live a very insular world based around my family and my home, and to them I’m not the Colin Firth of anything.

I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens. I can not bear gardening, but I love gardens.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

I grew up at my grandmother’s house, and she had a beautiful garden. I used to hate mowing the lawn and weeding, which is what you do when you’re a kid. I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens.

There were points when I’ve thought about getting into landscape gardening or getting back to illustrating, but mostly with a bit of a chip on my shoulder.

Cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books are guilty pleasures and useful time fillers.

Garden as though you will live forever.

The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.

Gardening always has been an art, essentially.

If I’m in the country, my big idea is to do nothing. It means talking, it means cooking with the leftovers in the fridge – l’art d’accommoder les restes – it means gardening.

Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colors.

If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.

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

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

Perhaps the CDC should quit spending money on things like jazzercise, urban gardening, and massage therapy and direct that money to where it’s appropriate in protecting the health of the American people.

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

I’ve always loved the woods, and I’ve always loved gardening and a lot of solitude and quiet.

I’d love to take up organic vegetable gardening, do anything that involves learning.

The space and light up there in Norfolk is wonderfully peaceful. I find myself doing funny things like gardening, and cooking, which I rarely do in London.

Without doubt, without hesitation, I choose gardening over the gym. I can’t stand going to the gym. It doesn’t appeal to me at all. Give me gardening every time.

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.

I love decorating my home. I’m a gardener too, so that’s usually something I have to play catch up with.

In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

There is nothing I like better at the end of a hot summer’s day than taking a short walk around the garden. You can smell the heat coming up from the earth to meet the cooler night air.

I think that’s my strength, that I am an amateur gardener who loves gardening. I’ve read about it, I’ve written about it, I’ve done it all my life but at heart, I’m just a passionate amateur gardener.

I like gardening – it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

Gardening has just sort of grown on me. I find it therapeutic. And I like smelly things.

I loved to get all dusty and ride horses and plant potatoes and cotton.

Many talk about a guest worker program. I think most reasonable people believe that a guest worker program in the farming industry, perhaps in the gardening and landscape industries, is reasonable.

My partner loves gardening and beekeeping and chickens and all that stuff.

One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one’s horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?

My gardening apprenticeship was similar to the way a chimney sweep is pushed up a chimney. It was enforced by my parents, non-negotiable – it would be weeding the strawberries, mowing the grass.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful writer to settle down, build his dream house, and maybe do some gardening.

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

I like to encourage people interested in gardening or planting to begin with a simple herb garden. Even if you live in a small apartment, you can have some herb pots.

When I go into the garden, I forget everything. It’s uncomplicated in my world of gardening. It’s trial and error, really. If something doesn’t work, it comes out, and you start all over again.

The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives.

I enjoy painting, cutting the lawn and working in the garden when I have time. That’s therapy for me. I enjoy working with my hands.

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant – rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance – but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

The Herbs ought to be distilled when they are in their greatest vigor, and so ought the Flowers also.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

I like solitary pursuits, such as reading or pottering about in the garden.

You have to put your partner and family at the top of the list and there must be downtime – time for gardening, cooking time, book reading time.

If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.

People are increasingly realising that what they eat is important. You can’t put junk food in your body and be healthy. All sorts of problems can develop, like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, strokes. Gardening not only helps with exercise and mental health, but it can improve diet as well.

I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in both gardening and painting. I must have been born with a trowel in one hand and a paintbrush in the other.

When I’m outside gardening, it can be so inspiring. I think of words and melodies. It’s peaceful. Every singer-songwriter should find something outside of music that makes them as happy as gardening makes me.

I like to keep fit, and when not gardening or singing solo or in a choir, I cycle, play tennis, swim, dance, and practise yoga.

But if each man could have his own house, a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings – then, I thought, there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life.

My neighbour asked if he could use my lawnmower and I told him of course he could, so long as he didn’t take it out of my garden.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.

My extravagance is my garden – it’s the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.

Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.

To dwell is to garden.

I am so longing to be domestic,, cooking stew, gardening, hopefully having some children, painting, sitting still in one place.

A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.

I put quite a few trees in last autumn. A lot of silver birch and a couple of native trees – just generally doing gardening, putting plants in and hedges in. It takes quite a lot of time and I love it.

I’m always surrounded by crazy people, but when I come back to the country I’m into my plants, I love gardening, I love bird watching and I absolutely love nature.

I like the physical activity of gardening. It’s kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.

I’m not a gardener. I don’t have the consistency for gardening, and I have barely enough for an orchard. I don’t embarrass myself. You have to be there tending and weeding. With orchards, you can go through negligent periods and recover.

I bought a former library, not because I have a lot of books, but also I like architecture, and it was built in 1965, and I like gardening.

The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

Use plants to bring life.

What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.

I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia.

I don’t hold that everybody has to love fashion. Some people like gardening.

The more help a person has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.

My parents were/are straight-edge hippies. Mom roamed around gardening so we would have fresh food, and Dad was on wood-chopping duty to heat our passive solar home that they figured out how to design and build together. I was the kid with green peppers in my lunch, and I liked them!

I really cherish my time at home. As you know, I love my husband so much, but he’s always doing everything for me out here to keep me rolling forward. But I don’t get to do near enough for him. So when I’m at home, I like to cook for him and do some gardening – all that wife-y kinda stuff, you know?

Gardening does so much for your brain. You’re learning how a process works, and how important it is to do everything right so that you can eventually enjoy a tomato three months later. I’ve always been patient, but gardening really helps you with that.

I find myself listening to Talk Talk on repeat while I’m doing gardening in upstate New York. Their music is so languid, and I just love his voice.

I’m pretty good at gardening. It consumes my time, and it feels like I’m doing something constructive.

I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

I’m huge on spring and summer gardening. I’m really proud of my perennial beds. That’s a passion of mine.

It’s true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else.

I’ve never really understood the criticism that climbing is inherently selfish, since it could equally be argued about virtually any other hobby or sport. Is gardening selfish?

I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France – that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

A weed is but an unloved flower.

Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise. That is easy to see and evaluate. It inculcates high levels of well-being. That is undeniable and needs little measurement.

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?

I’ve come to recognize what I call my ‘inside interests.’ Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news, but in hindsight, I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.

We are extremely uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects of gardening, and yet most people feel it in some form or other, even if it’s a sense of connection to the greater world on a beautiful day.

Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama.

I spend as much time as I can in my garden, and if I’m not writing songs or gardening, I’m painting.

I do the gardening.

I love Michel Roux, Jr., and James Martin – the chefs who are experts in their own right, like Rick Stein on fish. But I don’t watch them very much because I don’t think it’s fair for my husband to be in a total food environment all the time! So we watch programmes about gardening more.

I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

Cooking and gardening involve so many disciplines: math, chemistry, reading, history.

Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.

Gardening is a working meditation for me. It helps me remember process, and it helps me remember patience.

Fertilizer does no good in a heap, but a little spread around works miracles all over.

There is some risk to increase birth defects if you do a lot of outdoor gardening when you are pregnant. That can increase rates of toxoplasmosis.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

I like gardening.

The most lasting and pure gladness comes to me from my gardens.

Gardening and my culinary skills keep me busy.