Gardening Quotes

A weed is but an unloved flower.

The master of the garden is the one who waters it, trims the branches, plants the seeds, and pulls the weeds. If you merely stroll through the garden, you are but an acolyte.

Everything is an art, which must be mastered.

She soon called a halt to the work. Judy's great success was that she stopped her helpers before they got tired.

If every individual should plant a tree in their life time, the world will be full of trees.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space - a place not just set apart but reverberant - and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

May I a small house and large garden have;
And a few friends,
And many books, both true.

Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot.

A garden is beautiful only when it is filled with people; they determine its beauty

No one plants rosebushes for the thorns.

Soap wasn't invented until the Romans, who also invented interesting sex. (Since my editor informs me that a gardening book is not a proper venue for discussions of interesting sex, I will go into this topic in more detail when I write my private memoirs, 'A Petunia Named Desire').

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.

Dandelions, like all things in nature are beautiful when you take the time to pay attention to them.

Where have all the flowers of old Singapore gone? Gone, one would imagine, with the old folks and homes

We gardeners are healthy, joyous, natural creatures. We are practical, patient, optimistic. We declare our optimism every year, every season, with every act of planting.

One of the maxims of the new field of conservation biological control is that to control insect herbivores, you must maintain populations of insect herbivores.

He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.