Reading lines, phrases, proverbs or excerpts from famous gardeners, authors, artists, or literary greats can be apt reminders of how we would like to live our lives. They provide a new perspective seizing our attention that may inspire, and motivate our own beliefs. This is a collection of some of my favourite quotes, and many more can be found throughout my posts. If there is no citation, it is unknown or anonymous. All of the images were taken in Granda, Spain at Alhambra and Palacios Nazaries. More about the Alhambra Gardens here.
“Collect as precious pearls the words of the wise and virtuous”
Abdelkader El Djezairi
Life begins the day you start a garden.
Chinese Proverb
Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colours.
Oscar de la renta
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
Albert Einstein
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature is a help.
Mary Sarton
Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
When I first began with roses, moving into that vast territory of scent, form and colour. I knew nothing.
Mirabel Osler
“Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.”
Alice Morse Earle 1897
Begin doing what you want to do now.
Francis Bacon
We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand –
and melting like a snowflake.
Spring, is nature’s way of saying, Let’s Party!
Robin Williams
If once indeed a person is bitten with the passion for cultivating roses,
John Charles Sawyer
anything like a cure of it is hopeless.
“A rose is an argument. It proclaims the triumph of beauty over brutality,
Alan Meilland
of gentleness over violence, of the ephemeral over the lasting,
and of the universal over the particular.
The same rose bursts into bloom on the North Cape and in the Sahara desert.“
“Designing the garden is like learning to speak.
Beth Chatto
You begin with odd words learning the individual plants. Then you create a simple phrase,
finding two or three plants that look well together, next comes a sentence and finally the complete story.”
A garden isn’t meant to be useful, its for joy.
Rumer Godden
“The more I garden the less I know, but the more pleasure I get from it.”
Monty Don
“Novice gardeners should allow themselves from the outset the freedom to be as wayward
Mirabel Osler
as they want and to follow their instincts.”
Vita Sackville-West
” Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.”
“Anyone who has time for drama is not gardening enough.”
“It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth,
Kate Morton
to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season.”
“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
Abraham Lincoln
My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made
H Fred Hale
while learning to see things from the plant’s point of view.
“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you do a thing, do it with all your might.
Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality.
Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you
will accomplish your object.”
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
Lao Tzu, 6th century BC,
“I like generosity wherever I find it, whether in gardens or elsewhere. I hate to see things scrimp and scrubby.
Vita Sackville-West
Even the smallest garden can be prodigal within its limitations.”
The hum of bees is the voice of the garden…
Elizabeth Laurence
“It’s important not to overlook the therapeutic power of beauty,”
Dr Stuart-Smith
“I am only good at two things, and those are: gardening and painting.“
Claude Monet
“A rose poorly placed is a song sung out of key.”
Gertrude Jekyll
“In all the recipes for happiness I have ever seen, ‘something to look forward to’
Louise Beebe Wilder
has been given as an important ingredient.
Something to look forward to!
How rich the gardener, any gardener, is in this particular integrant!
For always he [or she] looks forward to something,
if it is only the appearance of the red noses of the peonies in the spring or the sharp aromas
that fill the air in autumn after the frost
has touched the herbage.“
The gardener learns to play the hand he’s dealt.
“And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.”
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Michael Marriot
A deliciously fragrant rose has the wonderful ability to both calm us down and raise our spirits
“Be different. Be original.
Suzzy Kassem
Nobody will remember a specific flower in a garden filled with thousands of the same yellow flower,
But they will remember the one that managed to change
its colour to purple.”
“I never promised you a rose garden”
Traian Basescu
“She walked away, slowly thinking. She had begun to like the garden”
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Gardening is like landscape painting to me. The garden is the canvas.
Ama H Vanniarachchy
Plants, containers and other garden features are the colours.
I paint on the garden of canvas hoping to create a master piece with my colours.”
How lovely is the silence of growing things.
Evan Dickens
“Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise
Alice Morse Earle
of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence.
To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal.”
Can words describe the fragrance of the very breath of spring?
Neltje Blanchan
“A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to
William Carlos Wiliam
me of all gentleness and its enduring.”
“Spring is when life’s alive in everything.”
Christina Rossetti
“There is nothing I like better at the end of a hot summer’s day
Peter Mayle
than taking a short walk around the garden.
You can smell the heat coming up from the earth to meet the cooler night air.”
“Do not watch the petals fall from the rose with sadness, know that, like life,
Geoffrey Chauce
things sometimes must fade, before they can bloom again.”
Janet Gillespie
One of the worst mistakes you can make as a gardener is to think you’re in charge.
The world laughs in flowers
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Morning is the best of all times in the garden. The sun is not yet hot.
Francis Cabot Lowell
Sweet vapors rise from the earth. Night dew clings to the soil and makes plants glisten.
I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn’t make gardens,
Monty Don
people make gardens.
And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.
“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.”
John Ruskin
“Expressing warmth and affection, one yellow rose at a time.”
“Won’t you come into my garden? I want my roses to see you“
Richard Sheridan
“… I am hoping for better times. That’s how you know us hapless gardeners —
Mary McGory
by our dirty fingernails and our absurd,
unquenchable optimism about next year.”
“Gardens and children need the same things –
Nicolette Sowder
patience, love and someone who will never give up on them.”
“Gardening, like living, should be fun.“
Christopher Lloyd
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud
Anais Nin
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare, or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state
Gertrude Jekyl
as may give an impression
of beauty and delight.“
“The most productive time in the garden is not spent digging and working but sitting and contemplating.”
“Each garden has its own surprise.”
“Even more important than what she gave her garden was what it gave her. in it,
Kristan Hannah
she found a sense of calm.”
“Learn to be an observer in all seasons.
Every single day, your garden has something new and wonderful to show you.“
Anyone who thinks that gardening begins in the Spring and ends in the Fall is missing the best part of the whole year;
for gardening begins in January with the dream.”
Josephine Nuese
“Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener
Geoffrey B Charlesworth
seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer.”
“Gardening is a kind of disease. . . .
Lewis Gannit
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.”
To create a garden is to search for a better world.
Marina Schinz
This hope for the future is at the heart of all gardening.
“Spring: the music of open windows.”
Terri Guillemets
“Everything in life has to have balance“
Donna Karan
Walter Hagen
You are here for a short visit, Don’t hurry, don’t worry and be sure to smell the roses along the way.
“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”
John Burroughs
“Life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.”
Leonard Nimoy
With gardening, it’s really all in the doing.
Monty Don
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
W B Yeats
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
William Shakespeare
“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.
Alan Watts
And instead of calling it work, realise it is play.”
“Time and patience bring roses”
Leo Tolstoy
A garden is not a place: it is a passage, a passion.
Octavio Paz
We don’t know where we’re going, to pass through is enough;
to pass through is to remain.’
There are no happier folks than plant lovers and none more generous than those who garden.
E H Wilson
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
Gardening is the purest of human pleasures.
Frances Bacon
“The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all. ”
Wendell Berry
The fragrance always remains on the hand that gives the rose.
“Gardens don’t just please the senses, they satisfy ones need for calm, privacy, balance, and stability;
Diane Ackerman
they allow one, no matter how weak or disenfranchised, to impose an order on the chaos and
govern living things.”
In a world full of daisies dare to be a rose!
Matshona Dhliwayo
“It has taken me half a lifetime merely to find out what is best worth doing,
Gertrude Jekyll
and a good slice out of another half to puzzle out the ways of doing it.”
“Where, you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”
Frances Hodgson Burnett
“We all have an idealised picture of the garden that we have carried around in our heads
Monty Don
from the moment it became ours and which, I guess, is never the same as the growing reality.
Over the years that the garden is coming into being that image carries you forward and inspires you,
but when things reach maturity, the cold light of reality can be harsh.”
“At the heart of gardening is the belief in the miraculous.”
Mirabel osler
I don’t know whether nice people tend to grow roses or growing roses makes people nice.
‘A soulmate relationship is not only peaches and cream but roses and thorns‘
“Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because
Alan Armitage
too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realised“
Take time to smell the roses.
“In looking back we remember only the triumphant consummations of each season.
Patience Strong
Failures and frustrations are forgotten; garden-memories are as perfect as garden-hopes.“
“Spring flowers are long since gone. Summer’s bloom hangs limp on every terrace.
Louise Seymour Jones
The gardener’s feet drag a bit on the dusty path and the hinge in his back is full of creaks.”
“Wild roses,” I said to them one morning. “Do you have the answers?
Mary Oliver
And if you do, would you tell me?” The roses laughed softly.
“Forgive us,” they said. “But as you can see, we are just now
entirely busy being roses.”
No matter the size, a garden is a gift and a joy!
Henry James
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the
two most beautiful words in the English language.
‘Once you’re a proper gardener, it never feels like ownership, more a joyful custodianship.’
Julie Myerson
Michael Riley
Gardens are not just case studies in design. They are stories of people’s lives.
“At the end of the day, your feet should be dirty, your hair should be messy and your eyes sparkling.”
Shanti
Architectural lines such as those from hedges, walls, paths or topiary are the bones of a garden.
Mirabel Osler
But it is the artist who then allows dishevelment and abandonment to evolve….
Jenim Dibie
“All I wanted was to plant poetry in broken places, and watch flowers grow.”
Gardens are restful to look at. They have neither emotions or conflicts
Sigmund Freud
“To contemplate roses is to punctuate one’s days with poetry.”
Annie-Sophie Rondeau
“Flowers are not symbols of power. Flowers are too brief, too frail,
Sharman Apt Russell
to elicit much hope of eternity. In truth, flowers are far removed
from the human condition and from all human hope. For a moment,
in that moment, flowers are simply beautiful.”
Janet Gillespie
One of the worst mistakes you can make as a gardener is to think you’re in charge.
“There is no gardening without humility.
Alfred Austin
Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom
of the class for some egregious blunder.”
A late summer garden has a tranquility found at no other time of year.
“Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.”
Charles Dickens
One of the most delightful things about gardening is the freemasonry
Margery Fish
it gives with other gardeners,
and the interest and pleasure all gardeners get by visiting other people’s gardens.
We all have a lot to learn and in every new garden there is a chance of finding inspiration
– new flowers, different arrangement or fresh treatment for old subjects.
Even if it is a garden you know by heart there are twelve months in the year and every month means
a different garden, and the discovery of things unexpected all the rest of the year.
“Gardening is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude
Jan Struther
without being thought unsociable.”
“When life throws thorns, hunt for roses.“
“Gardening is, apart from having children, the most rewarding thing in life”
Alan Tichmarsh
“All colours are the friends of their neighbours and the lovers of their opposites.”
Marc Chagall
Alexander Smith
“How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. ”
I am more myself in a garden than anywhere else on earth.
Doug Green
“Summer is already better, but the best is autumn.
Valentin Finnish
It is mature, reasonable and serious, it glows moderately and not frivolously …
It cools down, clears up, makes you reasonable“
Winter is an etching, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
Stanley Horowitz
Rudyard Kipling
“Gardens are not made by singing:—‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.”
“When I leave the garden, I take with me a renewed view. And a quiet soul.”
Jessica Coupe
The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies.
Paulo Coelho
Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential.
It seems to be constantly in the process of change:
Yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.
To be able to walk under the branches of a tree that you have planted
Mirabel Osler
is really to feel you have arrived with your garden.
So far we are on the way: we can now stand beside ours.
Any garden demands as much of its maker as one has to give.
Elizabeth Laurence
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.
“I like solitary pursuits, such as reading or pottering about in the garden. ”
Hayley Mills
“Take time to smell the roses. Appreciating the little things in life really can make all the difference.”
Andy Puddicombe
“I like gardening — it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.”
Alice Sebold
Once indeed a person is bitten with the passion for cultivating roses,
John Charles Sawyer
anything like a cure of it is hopeless.
“The right rose in the right garden can make your heart sing.”
Jeri Jennings
Frances Hodgson Burnett
“Is the spring coming’ he said. ‘What is it like?’ … ‘It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth…”
How rare to see a real cottage garden. It is far more difficult to achieve than a contrived garden.
Mirabel Osler
It requires intuition, a genius for letting things have their head.
Apprentice yourself to nature.
Richard W Langer
Not a day will pass
without her opening a new and wondrous world of experience to learn from and enjoy.
Martha Stewart
“Gardening is a humbling experience.”
“The language of gardening fuels the senses: talk with your hands, observe with your ears
Costa Georgiadis
and listen with your eyes.
“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with
Alan Watts
what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realise it is play.”
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
May Sarton
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“The more help a person has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.”
W H Davies
“Life is short and absurd and run through with pain and sorrow.
Monty Don
But even in the face of real suffering, gardening can make our days shine with joy.”
“It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Love thou the rose, yet leave it on its stem.
Edward Bulwer Lytton
‘The steady pulse of the seasons is the rhythm of life to a garden”
Jinny Blom
“It won’t be a chore, it will be a garden.”
Jeannie Mobley
“Sitting in your garden is a feat to be worked at with unflagging determination
Mirabel Osler
and single-mindedness. . . .
I am deeply committed to sitting in the garden”.
“Nature soon takes over if the gardener is absent.”
Hobhouse’s Rule
There is a continuity about the garden and an order of succession in the garden year
Susan Hill and Rory Stuart
which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense
there are no breaks or divisions-seed time flows on to flowering time and harvest time;
no sooner is one thing dying than another is coming to life.
“A piece of sky and a chunk of earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being.”
Thomas Moore
“The most important thing I’ve learned over the years is that gardening is about the doing:
Linda Brazil
the digging and weeding and watering. I may plan and plot and dream but
when it comes right down to it, I garden to garden.”
“I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses”
James Joyce
“The best tool in the garden is the knowledge of a gardener.”
…good gardening means patience and dogged determination.
Gertrude Jekyll
There must be many failures and losses,
but by always pushing on there will also be the reward of success.
“Play in the dirt. Because life is too short to always have clean fingernails.”
Live each day as if it were your last, and garden as though you will live forever.
Scottish Proverb
“I do not envy the owners of very large gardens.
Gertrude Jekyll
The garden should fit its owner or his or her tastes, just as one’s clothes do;
it should be neither too large nor too small, but just comfortable.”
“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece”
Claude Monet
Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation.
Karel Capek
It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.
Should it not be remembered that in setting a garden we are painting a picture?
Beatrix Jones Ferrand
“To plant and maintain a flower border, with a good scheme for colour,
Gertrude Jekyll
is by no means the easy thing that is commonly supposed.”
There are no happier folks than plant lovers and none more generous than those who garden.
E H Wilson
But the rose leaves herself upon the brier, for winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed.
John Keat
If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I imagine up and down the country during these blessed months of short days and long nights,
Mirabel Osler
a whole self-seeding of gardeners, with backs unbent, having put aside their boots, trowels and twine,
who can now have time to let their thoughts hang out: a time when everything is possible.
Winter is the time for comfort, good food, warmth,
John Burroughs
the touch of a friendly hand, and a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.
“A rose is an argument.
Alan Meilland
It proclaims the triumph of beauty over brutality, of gentleness over violence,
of the ephemeral over the lasting, and of the universal over the particular.
The same rose bursts into bloom on the North Cape and in the Sahara desert. “
“All gardeners know better than other gardeners.”
Chinese Proverb
“If I had a rose for every time I thought of you, I’d be picking roses for a lifetime.”
Swedish proverb
I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered.
Eleanor Roosevelt
But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue:
no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.
“But he that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.”
Anne Bronte
“It was roses, roses all the way.“
Robert Browning
“I consider every plant hardy until I have killed it myself.”
Sir Peter Smithers
Audrey Hepburn
“Gardening is the greatest tonic and therapy a human being can have.
Even if you have only a tiny piece of earth, you can create something beautiful,
which we all have a great need for.
If we begin by respecting plants, it’s inevitable we’ll respect people.”
“Among the many, many things the green thumb knows
Michael Pollan,
is the consolation of the compost pile, where nature, ever obliging,
redeems this season’s deaths and disasters in the fresh promise of next spring.”
“They are not long the days of wine and roses.”
Ernest Dawson
The soulful garden comes about through a good relationship between gardener and garden.
Ben Probert
“…a work of art is like a rose.
Clive Bell
A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art.
Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.”
“Roses do not bloom hurriedly; for beauty, like any masterpiece, takes time to blossom.”
Matshona Dhliwayo
Avoid being impatient. Remember time brings roses….
Stop. Breathe. Allow yourself the luxury of doing nothing for a moment, or an hour, or even a day.
Carole Katchen
“It is in emptiness that inspiration will appear.“
Zora Neale Hurston
“Trees and plants always look like the people they live with,
somehow.”
“There is no “End” to be written, neither can you, like an architect,
Mirabel Osler
engrave in stone, the day the garden was finished.
A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move.”
“A garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature.”
Jeff Cox
Let us give nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.
Michael Eyquen de Montaigne
“A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness;
Gertrude Jekyll
it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.”
“The unmulched garden looks to me like some naked thing which for one reason or another would be
Ruth Stout,.
better off with a few clothes on.”
“The secret of landscapes isn’t creation…It’s maintenance.“
Michael Dolan
“And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
Rudyard Kipling
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows.”
“Many things grow in the gardens, that were never sown there.“
Thomas Fuller Gnomologia 1732
Helen Humphrey
“The best gardens are a perfect balance of order and chaos.
The tension created by this constantly threatened balance
is the pulse of the garden itself.”
“Gardens are a form of autobiography.”
Sydney Edison
“The colour of springtime is in the flowers, the colour of winter is in the imagination.”
Ward Elliot Hou
“The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous. ”
Rabindranath Tagore
Liz Primea
“Growing things is a basic element of life, and gardening is a wise instructor in the art of living.”
“Nothing feels more like home than a garden full of gorgeous plants.”
“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”
Aristotle
“The intransigence of roses is something we have had to accept and now … I know which are docile
Mirabel Osler
and benevolent from those which are headstrong;
those that are pliant from those which are pig-headed.”
“Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.
Alice Morse Earle
You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. . . .
To be content with the present,
and not striving about the future, is fatal.”
“Philosophy is inevitably learned in a garden.”
Helen Rutherford Ely
“Nurturing, decisive, interfering, cajoling, gardeners are eternal optimists
Diane Ackerman
who trust the ways of nature and believe passionately in the idea of improvement.”
“The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.”
Ovid
“Working in the garden … gives me a profound feeling of inner peace. Nothing here is in a hurry.
Ruth Stout
There is no rush toward accomplishment, no blowing of trumpets.
Here is the great mystery of life and growth.
Everything is changing, growing, aiming at something, but silently, unboastfully, taking its time.”
“Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.”
Audrey Hepburn.
“Starting a garden is the beginning of making a series of mistakes.”
Mirabel Osler
Compared to gardeners,
Henry Mitchell
I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.
If you are not killing plants, you are not really stretching yourself as a gardener
J. C. Raulston
“I’ve always felt that having a garden is like having a good and loyal friend.”
C Z Guest
Water is compulsive; it draws each of us to gaze transfixed i
Mirabel Osler
n a becalmed state which few other things induce so forcibly.
“There’s little risk in becoming overly proud of one’s garden
Joanne R Barwick
because gardening by its very nature is humbling.
It has a way of keeping you on your knees.”
“It’s the time that you spent on your rose that makes your rose
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
so important…People have forgotten this truth,
but you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible
forever for what you’ve tamed.
You’re responsible for your rose.”
No two gardens are the same. No two days are the same in one garden.
Hugh Johnson
“But she was inside the wonderful garden, and she could come through the door under the ivy any time,
Frances Hodgson Burnett
and she felt as if she had found a world all her own.”
It is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about gardening.
W C Sellar & R J Yeatman 1936
You have got to love your garden whether you like it or not.
“Gardening is easy.
Monty Don
Stick it in the ground the right way up and most
plants will grow perfectly well.”
“May the flowers remind us why the rain was so necessary“
Xan Oku
A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses.
Chinese Proverb
“A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring”
William Cullen Bryant
“Gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.”
Mary Sarton
“Every thorn on a yellow rose is a reminder that beauty can arise from life’s prickly moments.”
Making a garden is like conducting a symphony…
Dame Elisabeth Murdoch
.different plants come forward at different times and you need to think
very carefully about their placement in relation to each other.
The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.
Alfred Austin
To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.
I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.
John Erskine
How lovely yellow is! It stands for the sun.
Vincent Van Gough
“Flowers make people better, happier, and more helpful;
Luther Burbank
they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.”
We live in a rainbow of chaos
Paul Cezanne
“Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That’s the fun of them. You’re always learning.”
Helen Mirren
“It takes a loyal gardener to tend roses.”
Sondra Faye
“Teaching you how to grow a garden is better than giving you a thousand roses.”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“We may think we are nurturing our garden, but of course it’s our garden that is really nurturing us.”
Jenny Uglow
The most serious gardening I do would seem very strange to an onlooker,
Helen Dillon
for it involves hours of walking round in circles, apparently doing nothing.
Some things are more precious because they don’t last long
Oscar Wilde
“Roses do not bloom hurriedly; for beauty, like any masterpiece, takes time to blossom.”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place, where colours are brighter, the air is softer,
Elizabeth Laurence
and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”
“A single rose can be my garden; a single friend, my world.”
Leo Buscaglia
“A rose is honoured for its beauty, not its size.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
“Just like the rose holds her beauty among the thorns-
Christine Evangelou
we can gather our strength from the most unlikely places.”
“As I work among my flowers,
Celia Thaxter 1894
I find myself talking to them, reasoning and remonstrating with them,
and adoring them as if they were human beings.
Much laughter I provoke among my friends by so doing,
but that is of no consequence.
We are on such good terms, my flowers and I.”
“One of the best tricks a garden plays is that you never quite remember how it’s going to be,
Anna Pavord
that first day after winter has gone, when you go outside and can stay outside all day
fiddling with jobs that aren’t pressing enough to weigh heavily but will nevertheless pay dividends.
A garden is made up of a thousand small inventions, but each small act is a defence (defiance even)
against a world without anchors or safe harbours.”
“With work in the garden care and worry vanish.”
Helen Rutherford Ely 1903
I want real flowers, perennials, which not only grow and change and die,
Emma L Roth Schwartz
but also rise again and astonish me. A garden shouldn’t just bloom and look pretty;
it should develop like the rest of life. Otherwise it, and we live only to be spaded under.
I love all things most gardeners abhor … I like the whole thing to be as wild as possible,
Edna Walling
so that you have to fight your way through in places .
“However many years she lived, Mary always felt that
Frances Hodgson Burnett
‘she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow’.”
All the flowers of tomorrow are found in the seeds of today
Indian Proverb
“Going out to the garden is to go on a holiday;
Mehmet Murat ildan
when you travel amongst the flowers, your body touches heaven and
our mind tastes the secrets of ataraxia- serenity”
“Perhaps out of pure heavenly goodness the spring came and crowned
Frances Hodgson Burnett
everything it possibly could into that one place.”
No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,
Thomas Jefferson
and no culture comparable to that of the garden. –
What a lovely thing a rose is!
Arthur Conan Doyle
“Come out here where the roses have opened. Let soul and world meet.”
Rumi
“Loveliest of lovely things are they on earth that soonest pass away.
William C Bryant
The rose that lives its little hour is prized beyond the sculptured flower.”
In my garden there is a large place for sentiment.
Abram L Urban
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.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
“Failure teaches much more than success.”
Monty Don
Michael Pollan
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.
The world is a rose; smell it and pass it to your friends.
Persian Proverb
Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
Richard B Sheridan
Jackie French
“No single sort of garden suits everyone.
Shut your eyes and dream of the garden you’d most love then open your eyes and start planting.
Loved gardens flourish, boring ones are hard work.”
Lucy Maud Montgomery
I love my garden, and I love working in it…
To potter with green growing things, watching each day to see the dear, new sprouts come up,
is like taking a hand in creation,
I think. Just now my garden is like faith—the substance of things hoped for.
“There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose,
Henri Matisse
because, before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.”
“Anyone who has time for drama is not gardening enough…”
Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.
Audrey Hepburn
The garden runs through our lives like a river through a field, like air in our lungs.
Monty Don
The garden does not end in space any more than it does in time.
The flowers grow as much in our minds as in the soil.
There are very few nights when I do not lie in the dark,
everyone else sleeping inside this creaking, bony house,
and go through the garden, seeing it with the clarity of a dreamer, t
aking it to pieces and putting it together again,
mending everything in my head.”
To be able to walk under the branches of a tree that you have planted is
Mirabel Osler
really to feel you have arrived with your garden.
“If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Karl Foerster
If I’m ever reborn, I want to be a gardener – there’s too much to do for one lifetime!
Vita Sackville West
“I like muddling things up; and if an herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there?
Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is?
That is, surely, the art of gardening.”
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
William Shakespeare
“Be like a rose; no matter how many thorns you encounter in life, bloom.”
Matshona Dhliwayo
To garden, you open your personal space to admit a few, a great many,
Tom Clothier
or thousands of plants which exude charm, pleasure, beauty, oxygen, conversation, friendship,
confidence, and other rewards should you succeed in meeting their basic needs.
This is why people garden.
It can be easy but challenging, and the rewards are priceless.
Robin Lane Fox
“Gardeners work with an ever-receding ideal of perfection; no sooner is something growing well
than they see how to place it better or give it a better neighbour.
To other’s eyes, all may look as well as could be expected,
but a good gardener’s eye sees more to be improved.“
“Flowers make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine,
Luther Burbank
food and medicine to the mind.”
We have learnt one thing the hard way;
Mirabel Osler
it is this: take other gardeners’ advice on design, or accept their plants,
only after you have seen their gardens.
“Where you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.”
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Rosalie Parker
“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
One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides.
W E Johns
“Turn off the news and get into the garden!“
“I used to think people were born with a love for plants and growing things.
Sarah Koontz
I now realise that learning to garden is like beginning a new relationship.
It is awkward and uncomfortable at the beginning,
but once you invest enough time into it, you can’t imagine your life without it.
The only way to be certain the relationship is going to last is to go through hard times and
discover that you still want to fight for it. “
“I am made for autumn.
Alys Fowler
Summer and I have a fickle relationship, but everything about autumn is perfect to me.
Wooly jumpers, Wellington boot, scarves, thin first, then thick, socks.
The low slanting light, the crisp mornings, the chill in my fingers,
those last warm sunny days before the rain and the wind.
Her moody hues and subdued palate punctuated every now and again
by a brilliant orange, scarlet or copper goodbye.
She is my true love.”
“I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower
Abraham Lincoln
where I thought a flower would grow. ”
“In winter, I plot and plan.
Henry Rollins
In spring, I move.”
Successful gardening is doing what has to be done when it has to be done the way it ought to be done
Jerry Baker
whether you want to do it or not.
A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry
Gertrude Jekyll
and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.
“Housework is for people who don’t know how to garden.”
Nature is our greatest teacher
Edna Walling
The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realises
Vita Sackville-West
how little one knows.
Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
Regina Brett 1956 Journalist
A garden must combine the poetic and the mysterious with a feeling of serenity and joy.”
Luis Barragan
Colour is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.
Claude Monet
The garden must first be prepared in the soul, or else it will not flourish.
English Proverb
Architectural lines such as those from hedges, walls, paths or topiary
Mirabel Osler
are the bones of a garden. But it is the artist who then allows dishevelment and abandonment to evolve….
How rare to see a real cottage garden.
It is far more difficult to achieve than a contrived garden.
It requires intuition, a genius for letting things have their head.
Be pleased with your real garden, don’t persue the perfection of a picture.
Janet Macunovich
What you see in a photo lasted only as long as the shutter snap.
“You must fail at gardening to master it.”
“The rake, the hoe, the shears and the broom lie at the very heart of gardening”
Hugh Johnson
Stop. Breathe.
Carole Katchen
Allow yourself the luxury of doing nothing for a moment, or an hour, or even a day.
It is in emptiness that inspiration will appear.
“Do not watch the petals fall from the rose with sadness, know that, like life,
things sometimes must fade, before they can bloom again.”
“Nature is not a picture, it’s a process.”
Elke von Radziewsky
“The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies.
Paulo Coelho
Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential.
It seems to be constantly in the process of change: Yet at each state, at each moment,
it is perfectly all right as it is.”
A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Be pleased with your real garden, don’t persue the perfection of a picture.
Janet Macunovich
What you see in a photo lasted only as long as the shutter snap.
Robert Brault
“If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.”
“A life filled with love, must have some thorns, but a life
empty of love will have no roses.”
I want real flowers, perennials which not only grow and change
Emma L Roth-Schwartz
and die, but also rise again and astonish me.
A garden shouldn’t just bloom and look pretty;
it should develop like the rest of life.
Otherwise it, and we, live only to be spaded under.
What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry,
Dorothy Gilman
see something wrong, stop to set it right,
and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.
“The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.”
Hanna Rion
“A killing frost devastates the heart as well as the garden.”
Eleanor Perenyi
There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare, or ugly,
Gertrude Jekyll
that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an
impression of beauty and delight.
If you enjoy the fragrance of a rose, you must accept the thorns which it bears.”
Isaac Hayes
In Spring, like it or not we are all beginners all over again.
“True friendship is like a rose, we don’t realise its beauty until it fades.”
“Learn from roses; even when trampled they give off perfume, not despair.”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“I probably wouldn’t kill so many houseplants if they could scream
for food and water the way my pets and children do.”
“Truths and roses have thorns about them.”
Henry David Thoreau
“A life filled with love, must have some thorns, but a life empty of love will have no roses.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“There’s little risk in becoming overly proud of one’s garden because gardening
by its very nature is humbling. It has a way of
keeping you on your knees.”
My extravagance is my garden
Ina Garten
it’s the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.
“Every spring, like it or not, we are all beginners, all over again.”
Dominique Browning,
Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction;
John Evelyn 1666
natural and instructive, and as such contributes
to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity.
“I’m not really a career person. I’m a gardener, basically.”
George Harrison
Geoffrey B. Charlesworth
“Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener
seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer.”
Sir Walter Scott.
Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.
In winter there are for many of us three gardens –
Katherine S White
the garden outdoors, the garden of pots in the house,
and the garden of the mind’s eye.”
William Howard Adams
“The garden, historically, is the place where all the senses are exploited.
Not just the eye, but the ear – with water, with birds.
And there is texture, too, in plants you long to touch.”
Louisa May Alcott’s
The June roses over the porch were awake bright and early on that morning,
rejoicing with all their hearts in the cloudless sunshine, like friendly little neighbours, as they were.“
“A garden is never so good as it will be next year.”
Thomas Cooper
Sheryl Crow
“No matter how chaotic it is, wildflowers will still spring up in the middle of nowhere.”
Glenda Jackson
To counter-balance the natural humility of motherhood, I garden …
In the garden, more than any place, I really feel successful.”
“Autumn is a season followed immediately by looking forward to spring.”
Doug Larson
“All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.”
Joesph Joubert
Ruth Ahmed
There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees–
as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again.”
Charles Dickens
“It was one of those March days
when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold:
when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
Cicero, 106-43 BCE
“What I need most of all are flowers, always, always.”
Claude Monet
“I am trying to make a grey, green, and white garden.
Vita Sackville-West
This is an experiment which I ardently hope may be successful, though I doubt it..”
“We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs.
Evelyn Underhill
How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.”
“The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided.”
Thomas Moore
Gardening is not a rational activity.
Margaret Atwood
“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant.”
Anne Bradstreet
“A garden is like the self.
Anne Raver
It has so many layers and winding paths, real or imagined, that it can never be known,
completely, even by the most intimate of friends.”
“Yes, I’d love to have a garden of my own –
Ruskin Bond
spacious and full of everything that is fragrant and flowering.
But if I don’t succeed, never mind – I’ve still got the dream.”
“Every garden presents innumerable fascinating problems.”
Winston Churchill
“I want to be like the lavender in a field of wheat: quiet and unassuming, yet impossible to ignore.”
Mary oliver
.. if I wanted to have a happy garden, I must ally myself with my soil;
Marion Crane
study and help it to the utmost, untiringly. …. Always, the soil must come first.
“Winter is an etching, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.”
Stanley Horowitz
“An addiction to gardening (roses) is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life.”
Cora Lea Bell
“I found myself aching to order up sacks of bulbs, to lift my trowel, to slice into the earth, and tuck away what amounts to hope, faith and promise.”
Barbara Mahany
“If something isn’t working in a garden its usually because of colour”
Kate Corbett-Winder
“One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.”
Henry David Thoreau
Only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer quiet stretches when you can savour belonging to yourself.
Ruth Stout
A book of quotations can never be complete….
Robert M Hamilton
Di Baker Collection of quotations, revised 2025.
All images Di Baker Granada Spain Alhambra Palace and the Generalife 2018 All Rights Reserved
If any quotation listed has no author cited it is anonymous or unknown.