Gardens / Gardening - Quotes

A garden always gives back more than it receives. - Mara Beamish

A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul. - Sadi

A garden is a friend you can visit any time. - Unknown

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

A garden is never so good as it will be next year. - Thomas Cooper

A garden is one of the few expressions of man’s nature that is altogether benign. - Nan Fairbrother

A garden is the best alternative therapy. - Germaine Greer

A garden is the mirror of a mind. It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year, and pressing on and pausing the whole to its own inherent rhythms. - Henry Beston

A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith, the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise. - Russell Page

A garden requires patient labour and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfil good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them. - Liberty Hyde Bailey

A garden that one makes oneself, becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography. - Alfred Austin

A good garden may have some weeds. - Thomas Fuller

A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library. - Henri Frederic Amiel

Any garden demands as much of its maker as he has to give. But I do not need to tell you, if you are a gardener, that no other undertaking will give as great a return for the amount of effort put into it. - Elizabeth Lawrence 

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. - May Sarton

E'vn in the stifling bosom of the town, A garden, in which nothing thrives, has charms That soothes the rich possessor; much consol'd, That here and there some sprigs of mournful mint, Or nightshade, or valerian, grace the well He cultivates. - William Cowper

Garden: One of a vast number of free outdoor restaurants operated by charity-minded amateurs in an effort to provide healthful, balanced meals for insects, birds and animals. - Henry Beard and Roy McKie

Gardening is a labour full of tranquillity and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity. - John Evelyn

Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it. - Author Unknown

Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity. - Lindley Karstens

Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe. - Thomas Berry

Gardening is an exercise in optimism. Sometimes, it is a triumph of hope over experience. - Marina Schinz

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas – working with nature provides the technique. - Elizabeth Murray 

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

However big or small your garden is, if you allow nature to touch your spirit, gardening will bring returns of peace, satisfaction, and well-being for as long as you continue to wander the garden path. - Norman H. Hansen

I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow. - David Hobson

I've learned that keeping a vegetable garden is worth a medicine cabinet full of pills. - Unknown 

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 are as beautiful. - Unknown

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it too? - Douglas Adams

It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought. - James Douglas

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So, we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet. - Jane Goodall

Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart. - Karel Capek

Man was not made to rust out in idleness. A degree of exercise is as necessary for the preservation of health, both of body and mind, as his daily food. And what exercise is more fitting, or more appropriate of one who is in the decline of life, than that of superintending a well-ordered garden? What more enlivens the sinking mind? What is more conducive to a long life? - Joseph Breck

My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view. - H. Fred Ale

Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that (even as his pain increases with each loss) he comprehends – truly knows – that where there was a garden once, it can be again, or where there never was, there yet can be a garden. - Henry Mitchell

Of all the ingredients we employ in the creation of a garden, scent is probably the most potent and the least understood. Its effects can be either direct and immediate, drowning our senses in a surge of sugary vapor, or they can be subtle and delayed, slowly wafting into our consciousness, stirring our emotions and coloring our thoughts. - Stephen Lacey

Our bodies are our gardens – our wills are our gardeners. - Shakespeare

Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. - Veronica A. Shoffstall

Scent is the most potent and bewitching substance in the gardener's repertory and yet it is the most neglected and least understood. The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it it detected. Each fragrance, whether sweet or spicy, light or heavy, comes upon you in its own way and evokes its own emotional response. - Stephen Lacey

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are. - Alfred Austin

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters. - May Sarton

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul. - Alfred Austin

The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part plowman. He modifies the climate around his home. - John R. Whiting

The less help you have in a garden the more yours it is. - Nikki

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. - Gertrude Jeky

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

The longer you garden the better the eye gets, the more tuned to how colors vibrate in different ways and what they can do to each other. You become a scientist as well as an artist, with the lines between increasingly blurred. - Marjorie Harris

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling. - Mirabel Osler

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies? - Richard Dawkins

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. - Audrey Hepburn

Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. - Marcelene Cox

Whatever else seems pleasant at first apprehension, at length becomes dull by too long acquaintance. But the pleasures of a garden are every day renewed. A garden is the only complete delight the world affords, ever complying with our various and mutable Minds. - Unknown

When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden. - Minnie Aumonier