Garden Quotes

“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God .” — Thomas Jefferson

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” –Greek proverb

“I’m not really a career person. I’m a gardener, basically.”– George Harrison

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”– Abraham Lincoln

“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”– Claude Monet

“She (or he!) who plants a seed beneath the sod and waits to see a plant,
believes in God.”

“To dig one’s own spade into one’s own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?”– Beverley Nichols

“The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.” — Gertrude Jekyll

“A garden is never so good as it will be next year.”– Thomas Cooper

“The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.” — Vita Sackville-West

“Earth laughs in flower.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”– Thomas Jefferson

“There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.” — Janet Kilburn Phillips

“Cares melt when you kneel in your garden.”

“A garden is a friend you can visit any time.”

“Friends are flowers in life’s garden.”

“In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.” — Kozuko Okakura

“Flowers are beautiful hieroglyphics of nature, with which she indicates how much she loves us.” –Wolfgang von Geothe

“If you have a mind at peace, a heart that cannot harden, go find a door that opens wide upon a lovely garden.”

“I garden, therefore I am.”

“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” –Aristotle

“Kiss of the sun for pardon. Song of the birds for mirth. You’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than any place else on earth.” — Dorothy Frances Gurney

“Don’t grumble that roses have thorns, be thankful that thorns have roses.”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” –William Shakespeare

“When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, There is always the garden.”– Minnie Aumonier

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” –Francis Bacon

“Cultivate the garden within.”

“I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.” –John Erskine

“But each spring…a gardening instinct, sure as the sap rising in the trees, stirs within us. We look about and decide to tame another little bit of ground.” — Lewis Gantt

“A weed is only a misplaced plant.”

“What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place.” — Donald Culross Peattie

“What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” — Emerson

“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” — Henry David Thoreau

“Gardening is the purest of human pleasures.” — Francis Bacon

“The garden is a mirror of the heart.”

“One who plants a garden, plants happiness.”

“The garden that is finished is dead.”– H. E. Bates

“He who plants a tree, plants a hope.”

“He who plants a tree loves others besides himself.”

“As Rosemary is to the spirit, so Lavender is to the soul.”

“Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into.”– Henry Beecher

“As the Garden Grows, so does the Gardener”

“To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”

“Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.”

“Though an old man, I am but a young gardener.”– Thomas Jefferson

“Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.”– Sir Walter Scott

“God almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.”– Francis Bacon

“There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.”

“Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul.” — The Koran

“In the Garden, my soul is sunshine.”

“We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.”

“A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul.” — Sadi

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. — Marcel Proust

“Where but in a garden do summer hours pass so quickly?”

“It is a greater act of faith to plant a bulb than to plant a tree.”–Clare Leighton

“All my hurts my garden spade can heal.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Tickle the earth with a hoe, it will laugh a harvest.”

“Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor’s.”– Mary Cantwell

“All gardeners know better than other gardeners.” — Chinese Proverb

“God gave us memories that we may have roses in December.”–J. M. Barrie

“The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.” — Phyllis McGinley

“All the wars of the world, all the Caesars, have not the staying power of a lily in a cottage garden.”– Reginald Farrer

“An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life.”

“Always remember the beauty of the garden, for there is peace.”

“The fair-weather gardener, who will do nothing except when the wind and weather and everything else are favorable, is never master of his craft.”– Henry Ellacombe”The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided.”

— Thomas Moore in The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life“It would never occur to most of us that ‘plants’ say anything at all, except in terms of what we read into them, or try to use them for. Yet in their responses to this wonderfully rhythmic and varying earth they are the most expressive of all forms of life.”
— John Hay in A Beginner’s Faith in Things Unseen“Gardens bring us into contact with the cycles and irrefutable laws of nature, teaching us indelible lessons about ourselves and about the messy, difficult, and beautiful processes of living.”
— Cait Johnson in Earth, Water, Fire, and Air

“A garden is so much like a church. So much care and feeding. Such competitiveness among the plants — some of them literally choke each other to death if you don’t get out there and put a stop to it. The big gorgeous ones get lots of attention, but then one comes along that looks almost dead all season and suddenly, almost overnight, blooms splendidly forth. Never write anybody off completely. You just don’t know.
— Barbara Cawthorne Crafton in Let Us Bless the Lord, Year One

“When a garden is used as a place to pause for thought, that is when a Zen garden comes to life. When you contemplate a garden like this it will form as lasting impression on your heart.”
— Muso Soseki in The Temple in the House by Anthony Lawlor

“Japanese gardens ask that you go beyond the garden spiritually, that you look at the garden not merely as an object but also as a path into the realms of spirit.”
— Makoto Ooka in The Temple in the House by Anthony Lawlor

“The gardens of Islam also embody a religious ideal. The name ‘Paradise’ comes from ‘pairdaeza,’ Old Persian for a park or enclosure, and wherever Islam held sway can be found enclosed, paradisiacal gardens. These ideal oases of a dessert people have trees for shade, and water, revered as an elemental force, for music and entrancement, and its ability to open the mind to inspiration.
— Jennifer Westwood in Sacred Journeys

“It is forbidden to live in a town that does not have a green garden.”
— Talmud, Yerushalmi, Kiddushin 4:12

“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