Wise Words

Most gardeners enjoy/love what they do. They are a resilient, patient and pragmatic breed. Sometimes though, we need to hear a few words of encouragement or endorsement. Here is a small selection to consider:

“Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.” – Lewis Gannit

“The best way to save plants is to successfully cultivate and propagate them, then share them with others. ” – Roy Lancaster

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” — Margaret Atwood

“Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature.” – Penelope Hobhouse

“The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.” – Elizabeth Lawrence

“Gardening, like living, should be fun” – Christopher Lloyd

“You know you are a hard-core gardener if you deadhead flowers in other people’s garden.” – Sue Careless

“I grew up watching ‘Star Trek.’ I love ‘Star Trek.’ ‘Star Trek’ made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world. But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth. And what I do is I study insects.” – Michael Dickinson

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

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” — Rachel Carson

“Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.” – A. A. Milne

“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” — John Muir

“April … hath put a spirit of youth in everything.” — William Shakespeare

“September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.” – Alexander Theroux

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

“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flower explodes, and every sunset is different.” – John Steinbeck

“Everything grows for everybody. Everything dies for everybody, too.” – Henry Mitchell

“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.” – Vita Sackville-West

“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” — Albert Camus

“Winter dawn is the color of metal. The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.” – Sylvia Plath

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” — Albert Einstein

“Gardening is not a rational act.” – Margaret Atwood

“Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration.” – Lou Erickson

“A good garden may have some weeds.” – Thomas Fuller

“To recreate Eden, just plant, watch and wait” – Anna Pavord

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow” – Audrey Hepburn

“Autumn is a second spring, when every leaf is a flower” – Albert Camus

“… Every month means a different garden, and the discovery of things unexpected all the rest of the year. ” – Margery Fish

“It is no use asking me or anyone else how to dig… Better to go and watch a man digging, and then take a spade and try to do it.” – Gertrude Jekyll

“Good bones are important, so it is wise to go slowly and get your plan right before launching into a vital project.” – Rosemary Verey

“People who are not gardeners always say that the bare beds of winter are uninteresting; gardeners know better, and take even a certain pleasure in the neatness of the newly dug, bare, brown earth.” – Vita Sackville-West

“… there are times when the greatest kindness you can do a plant is to leave it strictly alone” – Henry Mitchell

“Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be.” – Christopher Lloyd

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” – Winston Churchill

“All gardening is landscape painting.” – William Kent

“Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That’s the fun of them. You’re always learning.” – Helen Mirren

“He plants trees to benefit another generation.” – Caecilius Statius

“Life begins the day you start a Garden.” – Chinese Proverb

“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful — an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” — Ansel Adams

“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.” – Henry David Thoreau

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