Best 202 quotes in «gardening quotes» category

Oh, my child, can you not see? You must let go of yourself. For if a seed wishes to live, it must sacrifice itself and grow outward, not inward.

One of my favorite dialogue pieces from Black Creek Burning: “It was a polite, white lie,” Brie whispered. “I’ll have to remember you think that way,” Nathan said.

Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call 'cultural studies.

One must also have faith to grow flowers...

Other than involving yourself with ungrateful vegetable matter, colour, vigour and fascination can be imparted into a small outdoor space by several other methods. In the 18th century, the inclusion of a hermit on one's estate was regarded as the epitome of country house style. There is absolutely no reason why today's dandy should not avail himself of the same privilege. It's a straightforward enough matter to entice a hopelessly drunk vagrant back to your premises using the simple lure of an opened bottle of wine. Once there, dress him in a bed sheet, wreathe his head in foliage and invite him to take up residence in an old barrel with the promise of unlimited alcohol, tobacco and scraps from your table in return for a sterling display of relentless solitude. Such a move not only provides the disadvantaged with ideal employment opportunities, but also enhances your reputation for stylish romanticism. Watch your friends gape in wonderment at the picturesque spectacle as your hermit sporadically peers out the top of the barrel and matters a few enigmatic words of wisdom.

Perhaps we are not really sinners in the hands of an angry God, after all. Perhaps we are all more like seedlings in the hands of a wise gardener.

Prune my ambition to the lowly prayer That I may drive the furrow of my tale Straight, through the lives and dignities I know.

Quite honestly, most of us don’t live in a world with perfect loam.

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.

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

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').

So far as I am concerned the difference between men and women is that men are interested in cutting grass and women are not. I actually prefer a daisy-sprinkled lawn; Jack, of course, wanted meticulous stripes.

Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.

The experience of watching your garden grow gives you some idea of how future AI systems will feel when observing human life.

She was a woman with a broom or a dust- pan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You saw her cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or you saw her setting out the baked pies at noon or taking them in, cool, at dusk. She rang porcelain cups like a Swiss bell ringer to their place. She glided through the halls as steadily as a vacuum machine, seeking, finding, and setting to rights. She made mirrors of every window, to catch the sun. She strolled but twice through any garden, trowel in hand, and the flowers raised their quivering fires upon the warm air in her wake. She slept quietly and turned no more than three times in a night, as relaxed as a White glove to which, at dawn, a brisk hand will return. Waking, she touched people like pictures, to set their frames straight.

The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.

Shun artificial rocks like the plague.

The earth sometimes rewards humans who do good works for the planet. Look out for unexpected windfalls of produce from the earth such as baskets of fruit or vegetables given to you unexpectedly, nature handcrafts, or a bunch of flowers picked from a beloved garden. These are all signs that the gifts not only came from the giver but from Mother Earth herself. - Fairy of the woods

The key to great bamboo, Yamashita tells me, is space. Bamboo trees can reproduce for six years, but their roots need room to spread, and the sun needs room to bake the forest floor. More than a farmer, Yamashita is a constant gardener, pruning branches, keeping the trees to a height of six meters, using rice husk to sow nutrients into the soil. The best bamboo is found deep underground, safely away from sunlight, turning the harvest into something resembling a truffle hunt. We walk carefully and quietly through the forest, looking for little cracks in the earth that indicate a baby bamboo trying to make its way to the surface. When we spot cracks, Yamashita comes by with a small pick and gently works the soil until he reaches the bulb. Most bamboo you see is ruddy brown or purple, but Yamashita's takenoko comes out lily white, tender, and sweet enough to eat like an apple. "You have to cook it right away, otherwise you begin to lose the flavor," says Shunichi.

The moment you step into a garden and begin to cultivate and prune, you become a killer.

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

There is all the pleasure that one can have in golddigging in finding one’s hopes satisfied in the riches of a good hill of potatoes.

There is nothing more precarious than an environment whose smallest inhabitants have been completely removed.

The spring blossoms get you out of your head and out working in the garden.

There is something soothing about working in the yard. Planting seeds and seeing them poke green out of the dirt. And it gets you out of the house with out going too far.

This garden is your life. Of course, there are the occasional weeds—but more than anything, this garden is filled with so much life!

Town-planning," Geddes once wrote, "is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is . . . to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish." These places, of course, are not really to be found, but have to be made. From his earliest designs for a botanical school garden and urban renewal work in Edinburgh to his latest building initiatives in Montpelier in southern France, Geddes pursued the creation of such places. He perceived himself as a gardener ordering the environment for the benefit of life.

The Good Gardener planted each of us here for a reason.

The way to get a deciduous hedge for free is to ask a neighbor to let you take divisions from his shrubs. You can take ten or twenty sucker-like shoots with their roots attached before he will notice and start to feel like a sucker himself. Thank him profusely and suggest that you'd love to have him and the wife over to dinner sometime, but don't give a specific date. Perhaps in the winter, you might suggest, when there's not so much work to do in the yard. ...in about three to five years the little suckers will grow into an informal hedge whose height will depend on the type of shrub you have selected. I know three to five years is a long time when you're middle-aged and older. But what do you want? You've just glommed several hundred dollars' worth of shrubs for free, for heaven's sake. In three to five years your neighbor will have forgotten about that dinner, also.

This is, however, one of the greatest delights of a garden; the nearly hypnotic ability it has to make you slow down, consider things about life more carefully, wrangle over difficulties with care and imagination rather than anger and ferocity.

Watering everyday on a seed results in fruitful faith.

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.

We may not have a new roof by then. But we will have flowers. Far more important, wouldn't you agree?

...Want to know why my roses grow dead on a living vine? Prayer against civil war. Let us hate with a single heart. Don't drink the runoff. I always wanted a ruin so I bought a run-'er-down. Love contaminates

We seem to have lost the gift of patience, of waiting for time to unfold its story.

Use the water of encouragement on someone else's flowers - especially the flowers that are wilted, trampled on, and taken for granted. But don't nourish the weeds.

We’re all given gifts in life, it’s what we do with them that shows us what we’ve learned.

When, in the morning at sunrise, I go out to Walheim, and with my own hands gather in the garden the peas which are to serve for my dinner, when I sit down to shell them, and read my Homer during the intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen, fetch my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up, and sit down to stir it as occasion requires, I figure to myself the illustrious suitors of Penelope, killing, dressing, and preparing their own oxen and swine. Nothing fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness than those traits of patriarchal life which, thank Heaven! I can imitate without affectation. Happy is it, indeed, for me that my heart is capable of feeling the same simple and innocent pleasure as the peasant whose table is covered with food of his own rearing, and who not only enjoys his meal, but remembers with delight the happy days and sunny mornings when he planted it, the soft evenings when he watered it, and the pleasure he experienced in watching its daily growth.

...what I have found... is that I’m more alive and engaged with the edible landscape. For example, when the strawberries, cherries, or black raspberries ripen, it is an exciting moment! Nothing about a lawn is that exciting.

When I die, bury me with a few garden tools, I shall make a garden in the heaven too.

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

When tended the right way, beauty multiplies.

...why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life... Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people and the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you're all to yourself that way, you're really yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. As Samuel Spaudling, Esquire, once said, 'Dig in the earth, delve in the soul.' Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth.

You don’t have to do it all. If unrushing your life feels overwhelming or impossible, consider that it is impossible for you. That’s why we need God. Where you can’t, He already has.

You can spend your whole life traveling around the world searching for the Garden of Eden, or you can create it in your backyard.

.... all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One.

Who doesn't enjoy a little gardening? As we plant the seeds and remove the weeds we reap a wonderful harvest of blessings. What are the weeds? Anyone or anything that sucks the nutrients from the seeds we have planted. The seeds are our goals, desires, good thoughts and feelings. good works and deeds anything that uplifts us. If we don't keep up on our weeding then our garden will die.

You're not a gardener, are you? So perhaps you don't know that once a garden is established, much of good gardening is about removal rather than planting, honing what you have to produce a pleasing effect, sacrificing the particular for the good of the whole. Gardening is a creative pastime, but the result is always a work in progress; unlike a painting or a piece of music a garden is never fixed in time. ("In The Garden")

Your top priority needs to be—first and foremost—eating fresh, chemical-free produce and keeping your busy family healthy.

A garden is a friend you can visit any time.