Gardening quotes
Each month, a gardening-related quote by a famous person is added to this page.
- All gardeners know better than other gardeners.
- The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.
- A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
- Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
- We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
- To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
- I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia.
- How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence.
- My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.
- Gardening has just sort of grown on me. I find it therapeutic. And I like smelly things.
- 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.
- 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.
- God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
- The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
- When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
- I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and grow heirloom tomatoes, and I do have that dream. It would be lovely. I do love gardening and all of that, but I also love my work.
- Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That’s the fun of them. You’re always learning.
- Cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books are guilty pleasures and useful time fillers.
- Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.
- There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp.
- My life now is just trees. Trees and champagne.
- To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
- If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
- Gardening is not a rational act.
- Gardening is a humbling experience.
- I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.
- Flowers are happy things.
- Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they are tender. They have to be persistent.
- Earth laughs in flowers.
- It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
- Gardens are not made by singing ‘oh, how beautiful’ and sitting in the shade.
- Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
- Bread feeds the body, indeed, flowers feed also the soul.
- Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul.
- The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.
- No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.
- Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.
- Sweet, sane, still nakedness in nature! Ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more!
- 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.
- Do not spread the compost on the weeds.
- The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.
- A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
|
a Chinese proverb |
|
a Chinese proverb |
|
a Greek proverb |
|
A.A. Milne |
|
Abraham Lincoln |
|
Audrey Hepburn (submitted by Sue Sedelies) |
|
Barbra Streisand |
|
Benjamin Disraeli |
|
Claude Monet |
|
Clive Anderson |
|
D. H. Lawrence |
|
Eric Morecambe |
|
Francis Bacon |
|
George Bernard Shaw |
|
Georgia O’Keefe |
|
Helen Mirren |
|
Helen Mirren |
|
Hillary Clinton |
|
Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
|
John Steinbeck |
|
Judi Dench |
|
Mahatma Gandhi |
|
Marcus Tullius Cicero |
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
Martha Stewart |
|
Penelope Keith |
|
P.G. Wodehouse |
|
Ralph Fiennes |
|
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
|
Robert Louis Stevenson |
|
Rudyard Kipling |
|
Sigmund Freud |
|
The Koran |
|
The Koran |
|
Thomas Jefferson |
|
Thomas Jefferson |
|
Virginia Woolf |
|
Walt Whitman in Specimen Days, 1882 |
|
William Blake |
|
William Shakespeare (in Hamlet) |
|
William Wordsworth |
|
anon |