Best 23 quotes of Allen Lacy on MyQuotes

All gardeners need to know when to accept something wonderful and unexpected, taking no credit except for letting it be.

An angel, legend has it, took pity on a little shepherd girl who had nothing to give to the Infant Jesus in his manger. The angel handed her a weed, but first transformed it into this beautiful flower of winter.

Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII of France, had such an aversion to roses that she could not stand seeing one even in a painting.

A powerful hand lens [Eschenback Leutchlupe] with a focused beam of light opens up an entire world below the threshold of the ordinary experience of seeing.

But there is one place where a person can make choices that will lead in a small way toward greater sanity in dealing with the natural order. That place is the private garden.

Democracy is fine in politics. It should stay there, and we need more of it. But its political virture is no reason to practice it in the garden.

Gardening is in large measure a phenomenon of attention.

Gardener's , like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute. What we see at one particular moment is then and there before us. But there is a second way of seeing. Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by.

I cannot walk into our garden without constantly being reminded of the friends who have shared their plants.

I know of no common interest that exceeds gardening as a source of lifelong friendships, nor as a means of making new friends almost constantly.

Insects leave (Madagascar periwinkle) Catharanthus roseus out of their diets. So, for that matter, do deer. The reason is that the plants are loaded with alkaloids so potent that they are the source of vincristine and vinblastine. These are drugs important in routines of chemotherapy for treating Hodgkin's disease and certain forms of leukemia.

I suppose that for most people one of the darker joys of gardening is that once you've got started it's not at all hard to find someone who knows a little bit less than you.

Not knowing where your food comes from is a primary form of alienation.

Of course, the character of my garden is also determined by things beyond any human decision, mine or anyone else's.

One becomes a gardener by becoming a gardener.

Plants are the original chemists. Their sophistication makes DuPont and Monsanto look like little kids with chemistry sets.

Show me a person without prejudice of any kind on any subject and I'll show you someone who may be admirably virtuous but is surely no gardener. Prejudice against people is reprehensible, but a healthy set of prejudices is a gardener's best friend. Gardening is complicated, and prejudice simplifies it enormously.

The gardens I love best are those that are still affectionately tended by the people who own them and who made them - who planned and planted and replanned and replanted them, who dug in the dirt and moved hoses and watched the gardens change with the cycle of the seasons and over the passage of years.

We can plant to suit the needs of the birds and other wildlife that find a haven and a habitat on our home ground, and we can understand that to do so is a moral dictate, not a personal whim.

We quickly discovered that two kittens were much more fun than one.

When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.

Whether the are splashed with gold or white, striped with chartreuse or cream, or margined in light tones, they are nature's weaklings, and nature is still a matter of survival of the fittest. The survival of variegated plants depends on human intervention.

The rhythms that count - the rhythms of life, the rhythms of the spirit - are those that dance and course in life itself. The movement in gestation from conception to birth, the distole and systole of the hearts, the taking of each successive breath, the ebb and flow of tides in response to the pull of the moon and the sun, the wheeling of the seasons from one equinox or one solstice to another - these, not the eternally passing seconds registered on clocks and watches and not the days and months and years that the calendar imposes, define the time... we dwell within until our days ended