Try as we may, there will be failures. Moving a plant to another part of the garden sometimes makes all the difference, but enough is enough: getting a garden together requires a measure of ruthlessness." --Pamela J. Harper, “Designing with Perennials”,
"April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain." --T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"
"We can complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses." --Abraham Lincoln
“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” --Iris Murdoch
There is a great pleasure in working in the soil, apart from the ownership of it. The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world. -- author unknown
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. -- Celia Thaxter
It used to be thought that our love of plants was an impractical but pure passion. But now, in the age of environmental crisis, we're discovering that gardening is essential to human life. -- Jacqueline Heriteau
Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity. -- Thomas Jefferson
If I had but two loaves of bread, I would sell one and buy hyacinthus, for they would feed my soul. -- The Koran
Just living is not enough . . . One must have sunshine,freedom, and a little flower. -- Hans Christian Anderson
A garden is a place arranged for promenades and at the same time for the recreation of the eyes. But it is also an accessory to the house, serving it as an accompaniment, an environment; and, within certain limits, it is simply another apartment, an annex of the house. Therefore, how can the art which built and adorn the dwelling be refused the right to interfere in this exterior house? -- Vitet
I too have a new plaything, the best I ever had, a woodlot. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eyes level with her smallest leaf, and take an insects view of its plain. -- Thoreau
In his garden every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation. -- Louise Beebe Wilder
Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've never been without a garden, It's a lifetime challenge: a thing of beauty and a 3-D puzzle. -- Beatrice J. Elye
Will is the root, knowledge is the stem and leaves, and feeling is the flower. -- Sterling
Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any landscape as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. -- Emerson
The best stock a man can invest in, is the stock of a farm; the best shares are plow shares; and the best banks are the fertile banks of a rural stream; the more these are broken the better dividends they pay. -- H.W. Beecher
Much may be done with those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away. -- Charles Colton
Each of us is a trustee of the past, so on the traditions of the past may we build today for a better and more beautiful tomorrow. -- author unknown
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A garden is not made in a year; indeed it is never made in the sense of finality. It grows, and with the labour of love should go on growing. -- Frederick Eden
Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. -- Rabindranath Tagore
Bread feeds the body indeed, but the flowers also feed the soul. -- The Koran
I believe that the days to come already feel the wonder of the days that have passed and will permit that wonder to endure and increase. If this be blind faith, then every gardener has it, or he would never plant a seed. -- author unknown
And tis my faith, that every flower enjoys the air it breathes. -- William Wordsworth
Gardening gives me fun and health and knowledge. It gives me laughter and colour. It gives me pictures of almost incrdeible beauty. -- John F. Kenyon
If well managed, nothing is more beautiful than a kitchen-garden. -- William Cobbett
From the intimate union of art and nature, of architecture and landscape, will be born the best gardening compositions which Time, purifying public taste, now promises to bring us. -- Edouard André
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has Genius, Power, and Magic in it. -- Goethe
If you would be happy your whole life long, Become a gardener. -- Old Chinese Proverb
Unlike your favorite painting or sentimental vase, a landscape is alive and constantly changing. -- author unknown
Flowers in a city are like lipstick on a woman- it just makes you look better to have a little color. -- Lady Bird Johnson
A flower is an educated weed. -- Luther Burbank
The only two herbicides we recommend are cultivation and mulching. -- Organic Gardening Magazine
With landscaping, you never seem to reach a point when you feel the job is complete. -- author unknown
Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting. -- Wordsworth
What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars of the earth, and are not our stars the flowers of the heaven. -- A.J. Balfour
How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. -- Alexander Smith
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden . . . You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden. -- Rudyard Kipling
More grows in the garden than the gardener sows. -- Old Spanish Proverb
To create a little flower is the labor of ages. -- William Blake
We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. -- Joni Mitchell
Collectors thrill to tiny silver leaves or bronze ones, but little can excite the acquisition frenzy that leaves do with many colors at once. -- Ken Druse
Beauty never slumbers; all is in her name; but the rose remembers the dust from which it came. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Almost every person, from childhood, has been touched by the untamed beauty of wildflowers. -- Lady Bird Johnson
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. -- Edward Abbey
The secret of landscapes isn't creation...It's maintenance. -- Michael Dolan
Plants, like people, are social or anti-social: the good plant has to be able to live amicably with other plants in the border. -- Richardson Wright
"There is more pleasure in making a garden than in contemplating a paradise."
-- Anne Scott-James, Down to Earth, 1971
Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts. -- Mac Griswold
All the wars of the world, all the Caesars, have not the staying power of a lily in a cottage garden. -- Reginald Farrer
God Almighty first planted a garden and indeed it is the purest of all human pleasures. -- Francis Bacon.
I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds. -- Martha Smith
I want to be a lawn -- Greta Garbo (courtesy of W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman)
Irish gardens beat all for horror. With 19 gardeners, Lord Talbot of Malahide has produced an affair exactly like a surburban golf course. -- Nancy Mitford
Everyone had a Japanese maple, althought after Pearl Harbor, most of these were patriotically poisoned, ringbarked and extirpated. -- Barry Humpries
I want death to find me planting my cabbages -- Montaigne
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches -- Robert Frost
...make no mistake, the weeds will win, nature bats last. -- Robert Michael Pyle
There is nothing more agreeable in a garden than good shade, and without it, a garden is nothing. -- Betty Langley
I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yes, in the poor man's garden grows
Far more than herbs and flowers-
Kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind,
And joy for weary hours. -- author unknown
Queer things happen in the garden in May. Little faces forgotten appear, and plants thought to be dead suddenly wave a green hand to confound you. -- W E Johns
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. -- Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams
One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides. -- W. E. Johns
A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring. -- William Carlos Williams
I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
As one grows older one should grow more expert at finding beauty in unexpected places, in deserts and even in towns, in ordinary human faces and among wild weeds. -- C.C.Vyvyan
I should like to enflame the whole world with my taste for gardening. There is no virtue that I would not attribute to the man who lives to project and execute gardens. Prince De Ligne
Flowers seem intended for a solace of ordinary humanity -- John Ruskin
If I'm ever reborn, I want to be a gardener—there's too much to do for one lifetime! -- Karl Foerster
It has been said that vines are to bits of architecture what a dress is to a woman. It may serve to enhance beauty or to cover defects. -- Loring Underwood
I haven't much time to be fond of anything . . . But when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times . . . the roses get it. -- (William) Wilkie Collins
What a pity flowers can utter no sound!—A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle,—oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be! -- Henry Ward Beecher
When gardeners garden, it is not just plants that grow, but the gardeners themselves. -- Ken Druse
Chance was to work in the garden, where he would care for plants and grasses and trees which grew there peacefully. He would be as one on them: quiet, open hearted in the sunshine and heavy when it rained. -- Jerzy Kozinski
You are the kind of friend who would overlook my broken fence to admire my flowers. -- author unknown
It is only when you start to garden—probably after fifty—that you realize something important happens every day. -- Geoffrey B. Charlesworth
If you are not killing plants, you are not really stretching yourself as a gardener. -- J. C. Raulston
Always try to grow in your garden some plant or plants out ot the ordinary, something your neighbors never attempted. For you can receive no greater flattery than to have a gardener of equal intelligence stand before your plant and ask, "What is that?" -- Richardson Wright
The golden rule of gardening is to pay attention to local conditions of weather and soil. -- Carol Williams
Grass is the cheapest plant to install and the most expensive to maintain. -- Pat Howell
The garden is so ferociously sexy at night, it's almost lurid. -- Anne Raver
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
Windchimes in your yard will serenade garden creatures...squirrels, fairies and angels. -- author unknown
When your garden is finished I hope it will be more beautiful that you anticipated, require less care than you expected, and have cost only a little more than you had planned. -- Thomas D. Church
Plants are like people: they're all different and a little bit strange. -- John Kehoe
People who don't know how to weed shouldn't do it. People who know how to weed are gardeners. -- author unknown
Early to bed, early to rise; Work like h*ll and fertilize. -- Emily Whaley
Flowers and plants are silent presences; They nourish every sense except the ear. -- May Sarton
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 as beautiful. -- Abram l. Urban
Perfumes are the feelings of flowers. -- Heinrich Heine
If your garden was there before you were, chances are it grew out of many other's dreams. -- Ferris Cook
And the day came when the risk (it took) to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -- Anais Nin
A man should never plant a garden larger than his wife can take care of. -- T.H. Everett
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden. -- Frances Hodgson Burnett
Your mind is a Garden, your thoughts are the seeds, the harvest can be either Flowers or Weeds. -- author unknown
Flowers are the sweetest thing God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into. -- Henry Beecher
You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful. -- Montagu Don
Among gardeners, enthusiasm and experience rarely exist in equal measures. -- Roger B. Swain
Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime, Rot and consume themselves in little time. -- William Shakespeare
The hum of bees is the voice of the garden. -- Elizabeth Lawrence
By the time you find greener pastures, you can't climb over the fence… -- author unknown
The watering of a garden requires as much judgement as the seasoning of a soup. -- Helena Rutherford Ely
Gardening: a leisure-time activity involving lots of time and little leisure. -- author unknown
Where you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow. -- Frances Hodgson Burnett
A man should never plant a garden larger than his wife can take care of. -- T.H. Everett
Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth. -- Kahlil Gibran
Spade! ...Thou art a tool of honor in my hands; I press thee, through a yielding soil, with pride. -- William Wordsworth
Gardeners have to be a combined chemist, botanist and meteorologist to carry all such information in one's head and be able to send it forth when visitors pose embarrassing questions. -- Dr E.J. Salisbury
So much is written of the gardener's role in the creation and enjoyment of flowering beauty and so little said of the relish of honest labor that gardening requires. -- author unknown
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. -- Frank Lloyd Wright
Any garden demands as much of its maker as he has to give, but no other undertaking will give as great a return for the amount of effort put into it. -- Elizabeth Lawrence
The miracles of nature do not seem miracles because they are so common. If no one had ever seen a flower, even a dandelion would be the most startling event in the world. -- author unknown
How often it is that a garden, beautiful though it be, will seem sad and dreary and lacking in one of its most gracious features, if it has no water. -- Pierre Husson
Faithful Garden Variety reader Dahlink sends this photo in response to today's garden quotation. And it is a perfect response, I think.
The hum of bees is the voice of the garden. -- Elizabeth Lawrence
By the time you find greener pastures, you can't climb over the fence… -- author unknown
So great is the economy of Nature, that most flowers which are fertilized by nocturnal insects emit their odor chiefly or exculsively in the evening. --Charles Darwin
The gardening season officially begins on January 1st and ends on December 31. -- Marie Huston
The watering of a garden requires as much judgement as the seasoning of a soup. -- Helena Rutherford Ely
Today the art of gardening is practised much more often than any other, in ignorant, impulsive ways, by people who never stop to think that it is an art at all. -- M.G. Van Rensselaer
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
The lily was created on the third day, early in the morning when the Almighty was especially full of good ideas. -- Michael Jefferson-Brown
If it's rare, we want it. If it's tiny and impossible to grow, we've got to have it. It it's brown, looks dead, and has black flowers, we'll kill for it. -- Ken Druse
Don't wear perfume in the garden-unless you want to be pollinated by bees. -- Anne Raver
To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperors. -- Mary Cantwell
Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
