 |
 | ""We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of
the well-known definition of dirt - as matter out of place. What we call a
weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it." | |
 |
E. J. Salisbury
|
|
| "... garden books are quite unconscious that besides telling us how
to turn our patch of earth into a garden, they are also expressing the way
their age looks at the world, the state of their society." | |
|
Nan Fairbrother
|
|
| "... the most fiendish plant I know of, the sort of thing Beelzebub
might pluck to make a bouquet for his mother?in?law ... it looks as if it
had been made out of a sow"s ear for the spathe, and the tail of a rat
that died of Elephantiasis for the spadix. The whole thing is mingling of
unwholesome greens, livid purples, and pallid pinks, the livery of
putrescence in fact, and it possesses and odour to match the
colouring." | |
|
E. A. Bowles
|
|
| "A beautiful blossom is a fleeting thing It stays for a moment and
then takes wing: With special rays we catch it ere flight So all may enjoy
the beautiful sight." | |
|
Albert Richards
|
|
| "A fine garden being no less difficult to contrive and order well
than a good building." | |
|
|
|
| "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!" | |
|
T.E. Brown
|
|
| "A garden is a symbol of man"s arrogance, perverting nature to human
ends ... and humans are part of nature ... a perverse dilemma!" | |
|
Tim Smit
|
|
| "A garden should be in a constant state of fluid change, expansion,
experiment, adventure; above all it should be an inquisitive, loving, but
self?critical journey on the part of its owner." | |
|
Herbert Ernest Bates
|
|
| "A garden without cats, it will be generally agreed, can scarcely
deserve to be called a garden at all." | |
|
Beverly Nichols
|
|
| "A good garden may have some weeds." | |
|
Thomas Fuller
|
|
| "A handful of men working within the Zen sect of Buddhism created
gardens in fifteenth-century Japan which were, and still are, far more
than merely an aesthetic expression. And what is left of the earlier Mogul
gardens in India suggests that their makers were acquainted with what lay
behind the flowering of the Sufi movement in High Asia and so sought to
add further dimensions to their garden scenes." | |
|
Russell Page
|
|
| "A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that
will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind
precisely against what is wrong with us.... What I am saying is that if we
apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we
will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We
will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful
economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the
earth"s ability to produce." | |
|
Wendell Berry
|
|
| "All gardens, even the most native and naturalistic, benefit from the
hand of an artful pruner. In this season where the garden is poised for the
green flood of springtime, remember that our gardens are co?creations,
shared with mother earth. And like any good mother, she expects you to
tidy up your room. Now get clipping!" | |
|
Tom Spencer
|
|
| "All the seasons run their race In this quiet resting-place; Peach,
and apricot, and fig Here will ripen, and grow big; Here is store and
overplus - More had not Alcinous!" | |
|
Henry Austin Dobson
|
|
| "All things began in Order, so shall they end, and so shall they
begin again, according to the Ordainer of Order, and the mystical
mathematicks of the City of Heaven." | |
|
Sir Thomas Browne
|
|
| "Amazingly enough, almost all the fruits grown in home gardens, from
strawberries to apricots, are members of the same plant family, Rosaceae,
along with such decorative favorites as roses, mountain ash, flowering
quince.... Worldwide, there are about 3,400 members of this very ancient
plant group, which exhibit primitive characteristics." | |
|
Diane E. Bilderback
|
|
| "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. [-
the Christmas rose, Helleborus niger.]" | |
|
Allen Lacy
|
|
| "Ancient traditions have long associated holy wells and springs as
very special places of the Goddess or anima mundi: symbolic of the Great
Mother and associated with birth, the feminine principle, the universal
womb, the prima materia, the waters of fertility and refreshment and the
fountain of life. The dreaming sites, as they are called, have also been
associated with visions, healing, and other paranormal experiences. In
ancient Greece, for example, there were more than three-hundred medical
centers placed at water sources, where patients experienced
healing." | |
|
Christopher & Tricia McDowell
|
|
| "And hail their queen, fair regent of the night." | |
|
Charles Robert Darwin
|
|
| "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, begins with the dream." | |
|
Josephine Nuese,
|
|
| "As I write, snow is falling outside my Maine window, and indoors all
around me half a hundred garden catalogues are in bloom." | |
|
Katharine S. White
|
|
| "As is the garden such is the gardener. A man"s nature runs either to
herbs or weeds." | |
|
Francis Bacon
|
|
| "Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What
all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive
viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the
separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment
one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in
other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content." | |
|
Ken Wilbur
|
|
| "Can the garden afford any thing more delightful to view than those
forests of asparagus, artichokes, lettuce, pease, beans and other legumes
and edulous plants so different in colour and of such various shapes,
rising at it were from the dead and piercing the ground in so many
thousand places as they do, courting the admiration or requiring the care
of the diligent Gardiner." | |
|
Stephen Switzer
|
|
| "Colours change: in the morning light, red shines out bright and
clear and the blues merge into their surroundings, melting into the
greens; but by the evening the reds loose their piquancy, embracing a
quieter tone and shifting toward the blues in the rainbow. Yellow flowers
remain bright, and white ones become luminous, shining like ghostly
figures against a darkening green background." | |
|
Rosemary Verey
|
|
| "Cultivate the garden within. What was Paradise? but a garden, an
orchard of trees and herbs, full of pleasure and nothing there but
delights." | |
|
William Lawson
|
|
| "Digging potatoes is always an adventure, somewhat akin to fishing.
There is forever the possibility that the next cast ?or the next thrust of
the digging fork ?will turn up a clunker." | |
|
Jerome Belanger
|
|
| "Even while we study and master the individual tasks and lessons of
gardening, the garden remains as a place that is far greater than the sum
of its parts. After plant infatuations, color schemes, and double digging,
there is still the essence of the garden, the central theme that invites
our attention. Happily, the exploration and creation of the garden goes
on.... and on ... and on..." | |
|
Lynn Purse,
|
|
| "Every decade needs its own manual of handicraft." | |
|
Liberty Hyde Bailey
|
|
| "Finding what brings peace and joy to your heart is important after a
hard day at work, or just living in our intense world. Walking through your
garden at the end of the day can rejuvenate you. I wonder if God, Allah,
Jehovah, Shiva, Gaia or whatever Supreme Being you have come to know,
looks down on the Garden that He or She created with all the different
varieties of life and "oohs and aahs "? It is a curious thought, but I
think so." | |
|
Theresa Watkins
|
|
| "For me the appropriate metaphor for the inner spiritual centre is a
garden, a place of potential peace and tranquility. This garden is a place
where the Spirit of God comes to make self-disclosure to share wisdom, to
give affirmation or rebuke, to provide encouragement, and to give
direction and guidance. When this garden is in proper order, it is a quiet
place, and there is an absence of busyness, of defiling noise, of
confusion. The inner garden is a delicate place, and if not properly
maintained it will be quickly overrun by intrusive under-growth. God does
not often walk in disordered gardens. And that is why inner gardens that
are ignored are said to be empty." | |
|
Gordon MacDonald
|
|
| "Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think how
opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners themselves
tend to be. Nobody talks much about the muscular limbs, dark, swollen
buds, strip?tease trees and unholy beauty that have made us all slaves of
the Goddess Flora." | |
|
Ketzel Levine
|
|
| "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 & Roy McKie
|
|
| "Gardeners Know All The Dirt." | |
|
Proverb
|
|
| "Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural
and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious
contemplation, experience, health and longevity." | |
|
John Evelyn
|
|
| "Gardening is a long road, with many detours and way stations, and
here we all are at one point or another. It"s not a question of superior
or inferior taste, merely a question of which detour we are on at the
moment. Getting there (as they say) is not important; the wandering about
in the wilderness or in the olive groves or in the bayous is the whole
point." | |
|
Henry Mitchell
|
|
| "Gardening is such a highly individual area that it is irresistible
to egocentrics.... The word is used in its broadest, most correct sense
and is not to be confused with egoist. It includes not only those who are
normally, naturally self?centered, but also those who have been rendered
self?centered by circumstances ? those who are lonely, timid, shy; those
who have a compulsion to express themselves in some art or other; and,
especially, those who are ostriches, who are only truly happy when they
escape from the bewilderment of daily life by burying their heads in an
interesting, well?ordered, and preferably beautiful landscape." | |
|
Francis H. Cabot
|
|
| "Giving names to things is a way of knowing them and of seeing them
as well. Knowledge deals importantly in names, and naming requires the
sort of vision that discerns that these two objects are of the same kind
and those other two are not." | |
|
Allen Lacey
|
|
| "God created memories so that we might have roses in December." | |
|
Italo Svevo
|
|
| "God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December." | |
|
Sir James Matthew Barrie
|
|
| "God in his wisdom created these places And made them accessible to
those of all races Rare visions of beauty, and fragrant perfume
Distributed freely for all to consume. While Enjoying Nature, confessions
and pardons Sincerely flow forth, as love grows in God"s Gardens" | |
|
Catherine M. Prostak
|
|
| "Hands tremulous as cherry blossoms kept Faith with struggling
seedlings till the earth Kept faith with him, claimed him as he slept Cold
in the sun beside his upright spade." | |
|
Phoebe Hesketh
|
|
| "Hath not thy heart within thee burned At evening"s calm and holy
hour?" | |
|
Samuel G. Bulfinch
|
|
| "He who plants a tree, plants a hope." | |
|
Lucy Larcom
|
|
| "How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of
existence." | |
|
Benjamin Disraeli
|
|
| "I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love and
respond to it as they do to nothing else." | |
|
Celia Thaxter
|
|
| "I catnap now and then, but I think while I nap, so it"s not a waste
of time." | |
|
Martha Stewart
|
|
| "I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be
the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the
heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my
bed." | |
|
Robert Louis Stevenson
|
|
| "I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died." | |
|
Richard Diran
|
|
| "I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens,
gardening and gardeners.... Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of
defeat.... Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The
state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as
that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both
have become lotus eaters and drifters." | |
|
Colin Wilson
|
|
| "I have found, through years of practice, that people garden in order
to make something grow; to interact with nature; to share, to find
sanctuary, to heal, to honor the earth, to leave a mark. Through
gardening, we feel whole as we make our personal work of art upon our
land." | |
|
Julie Moir Messervy
|
|
| "I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in
a garden at the cool of the day." | |
|
F. Frankfort Moore
|
|
| "I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of
cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs." | |
|
Joseph Addison
|
|
| "If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment,
fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the
gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming
luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow." | |
|
Helen Dumore
|
|
| "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you
need." | |
|
Marcus Tullius Cicero
|
|
| "If your going to try to push nature, it just pushes right back
against you." | |
|
Neil Dunaetz
|
|
| "Illustrious predecessors." | |
|
Henry Fielding
|
|
| "In friendship"s fragrant garden, There are flowers of every hue.
Each with its own fair beauty And its gift of joy for you." | |
|
Unknown
|
|
| "In green old gardens, hidden away From sight of revel and sound of
strife, Here I have leisure to breathe and move, And to do my work in a
nobler way; To sing my songs, and to say my say; To Dream my dreams, and
to love my love; To hold my faith, and to live my life. Making the most of
its shadowy day." | |
|
Violet Fane
|
|
| "In my next life I want to come back as one of my cats. They
basically pretend we don"t exist. They sit like two bumps on a log and
watch us work for hours in the yard. They"re probably wondering, along
with the entire neighborhood, why we work so hard in our garden and it
still looks like hell." | |
|
Annie Spiegelman
|
|
| "In our everyday garden grow the rosemary, juniper, ferns and plane
trees, perfectly tangible and visible. For these plants that have an
illusory relationship with us, which in no way alters their
existentiality, we are merely an event, an accident, and our presence,
which seems so solid, laden with gravity, is to them no more than a
momentary void in motion through the air. Reality is a quality that
belongs to them, and we can exercise no rights over it." | |
|
Leo Lionni
|
|
| "In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year,
bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil. And at no
season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb colour effects
as from August to November." | |
|
Rose G. Kingsley
|
|
| "Indian monks were the first to choose the garden as the proper
setting for their lives, which were devoted to the contemplation of the
divine; but with a prophetic eye we may see that the garden will often be
dedicated in a like manner: at a later time Greek philosophers, and monks
in early Christian days, will retire into their gardens for united, yet
silent, contemplation." | |
|
Marie L. Gothein,
|
|
| "Is it too ingenuous to imagine that anything can be left to say
about a garden? Garden literature, descriptive, reminiscent, and
technical, has blossomed so profusely among us during the last decade,
that he should be an expert indeed who ventures to add thereto." | |
|
H. G. Dwight
|
|
| "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 Noel Adams
|
|
| "It is the omnipresent rush of water which give the Este Gardens
their peculiar character. >From the Anio, drawn up the hillside at
incalculable cost and labour, a thousand rills gush downward, terrace by
terrace, channeling the stone rails of the balusters, leaping from step to
step, dripping into mossy conches, flashing in spray from the horns of
sea-gods and the jaws of mythical monsters, or forcing themselves in
irrepressible overflow down the ivy-matted banks." | |
|
Edith Wharton
|
|
| "It takes time and devotion to learn the language of color and
lighting in the garden. Your tastes are sure to change over time,
reflecting your inner evolution. Seeing the garden as a canvas for your
celebration of Nature"s palette is a wonderful expression of the soul"s
love of beauty and artistry. Your own inner intuition, however, is often
your best teacher, but don"t forget that Mother Nature will always have a
few surprises up Her sleeve as well. Perhaps your greatest insight will be
that this glorious exploration of light and color and their
interrelationship is really meant to illuminate the many facets of your
being and personality." | |
|
Christopher and Tricia McDowell
|
|
| "It"s amazing how much time one can spend in a garden doing nothing
at all. I sometimes think, in fact, that the nicest part of gardening is
walking around in a daze, idly deadheading the odd dahlia, wondering where
on earth to squeeze in yet another impulse buy, debating whether to move
the recalcitrant artemisia one more time, or daydreaming about where to
put the pergola." | |
|
Jane Garmey
|
|
| "It"s the flock, the grove, that matters. Our responsibility is to
species, not to specimens; to communities, not to individuals." | |
|
Sara Stein
|
|
| "Like the Sweetness of Gardenias Mother, you died 15 years ago. pain,
a rapier, cut until, finally, there was just peace like the sweetness of
gardenias in the crystal vase on your yellow kitchen table. so fragrant.
your voice lingers in my ear reminding, scolding, guiding a pleasant
mantra of tenderness, magic words that move my palms, your palms. together
we are molding, helping, creating. in the mirror I see your eyes, your
beautiful brown circles looking back, so radiant. "don"t forget me," you
whispered the day you died. I won"t." | |
|
Wallace Stevens
|
|
| "Like William Morris, Joe Hollis asks us to perceive paradise
gardening as a juncture where artfulness directly serves life. In fact, we
might go so far as to define this paradise as the place where art is
indistinguishable from life, and where simplicity is codified as the best
path for achieving happiness." | |
|
Jim Nollman
|
|
| "Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its
happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own
resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds,
and other seas; Annihilating all that"s made To a green thought in a green
glade ... Such was that happy garden-state, ..." | |
|
Andrew Marvell
|
|
| "More black than ash-buds in the front of March." | |
|
Lord Alfred Tennyson
|
|
| "Most people who succeed n the face of seemingly impossible
conditions are people who simply don"t know how to quit." | |
|
The Rev. Robert H. Schuller
|
|
| "My lilac trees are old and tall; I cannot reach their bloom at all.
They send their perfume over trees And roof and streets, to find the
bees." | |
|
Louise Driscoll
|
|
| "Of all the flora and fauna on earth, it is only man that desires or
needs rules." | |
|
Thomas Clothier
|
|
| "Of the Second Amendment: The right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to
their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government. In
the appendix to the Commentaries, Tucker elaborates further: This may be
considered as the true palladium of liberty... The right of self-defense
is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of
rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible.
Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep
and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited,
liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of
destruction." | |
|
St. George Tucker
|
|
| "One of the most delightful things about gardening is the freemasonry
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." | |
|
Margery Fish
|
|
| "Perfect moments come in every garden, though more frequently in some
than others. To the very active gardener they may not be of great
importance and usually they will be happy accidents, lucky moments when,
chancing to glance up, the gardener will see that this or that grouping of
plants at the height of their flowering looks exactly right, because of the
way the light falls on them." | |
|
Susan Hill & Rory Stuart
|
|
| "Planting is one of my great amusements, and even of those things
which can only be for posterity, for a Septuagenary has no right to count
on any thing but annuals." | |
|
Thomas Jefferson
|
|
| "Poets and novelists are often moved to put into words the subtle
qualities of the landscape, sometime purely for the beauty of it, and
sometimes as a way of alluding to certain human feelings. Landscape design
can translate such literary landscapes into three-dimensional form in the
garden. Like the poet, the garden designer may allude to human feelings in
his portrayals of nature." | |
|
David S. Slawson
|
|
| "Regarding Winter: There is a privacy about it which no other season
gives you ..... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open
season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have
longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself." | |
|
Ruth Stout
|
|
| "Right on to the New Period vineyard arbors were the centre and chief
ornament of all gardens." | |
|
Marie Luise Gothein
|
|
| "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
|
|
| "Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and
is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest
personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first
which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence." | |
|
Louis Pasteur
|
|
| "Seek to understand what draws you to the garden. You may discover
greater rewards than the blue ribbons awarded for the biggest pumpkin or
the best preserves. You may find the garden becomes a teacher and crop
"failures" become lessons learned. 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
|
|
| "Soil is a resource, a living, breathing entity that, if treated
properly, will maintain itself. It"s our lifeline for survival. When it
has finally been depleted, the human population will disappear.... Project
you imagination into the soil below you next time you go into the garden.
Think with compassion of the life that exists there. Think, the drama, the
sexuality, the harvesting, the work that carries on ceaselessly. Think
about the meaning of being a steward for the earth." | |
|
Marjorie Harris
|
|
| "Soon shall thy arm, unconquer"d steam! afar Drag the slow barge, or
drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying
chariot through the field of air." | |
|
Erasmus Darwin
|
|
| "Sow Carrots in your Gardens, and humbly praise God for them, as for
a singular and great blessing." | |
|
Richard Gardiner
|
|
| "Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time as you
ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place on seats chosen for
their essential and individual quality, are other whole aspects of being a
gardener. Why shouldn"t we? We sit in other people"s gardens, why not in
our own." | |
|
Mirabel Osler
|
|
| "Take it from us, it is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about
gardening. You have got to love your garden, whether you like it or
not." | |
|
W. C. Sellar & R. J. Yeatman
|
|
| "The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him
there." | |
|
George Bernard Shaw
|
|
| "The fair-weather gardener, who will do nothing except when wind and
weather and everything else are favourable, is never a master of his
craft. Gardening, above all other crafts, is a matter of faith, grounded,
however (if on nothing better), on his experience that somehow or other
seasons go on in their right course, and bring their right results. No
doubt bad seasons are a trial of his faith; it is grievous to lose the
fruits of much labour by a frosty winter or a droughty summer, but, after
all, frost and drought are necessities for which, in all his calculations,
he must leave an ample margin; but even in the extreme cases, when the
margin is past, the gardener"s occupation is not gone." | |
|
Canon Ellacombe
|
|
| "The first western gardens were those in the Mediterranean basin.
There in the desert areas stretching from North Africa to the valleys of
the Euphrates, the so-called cradle of civilization, where plants were
first grown for crops by settled communities, garden enclosures were also
constructed. Gardens emphasized the contrast between two separate worlds:
the outer one where nature remained awe-inspiringly in control and an
inner artificially created sanctuary, a refuge for man and plants from the
burning desert, where shade trees and cool canals refreshed the spirit and
ensured growth." | |
|
Penelope Hobhouse
|
|
| "The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the
spiritual path." | |
|
Larry Dossey
|
|
| "The gardener who imagines that his work can be reduced to a set of
rules and formulae, followed and applied according to special days marked
on the calendar, is but preparing himself for a double disappointment. Few
things are so certain to be uncertain as the seasons and the weather; and
these, rather than a set of dates, even for a single locality, form the
signs which the real gardener follows. That is the great trouble with much
book and magazine gardening." | |
|
Frederick Frye Rockwell
|
|
| "The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart
with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the
soul. Share the botanical bliss of gardeners through the ages, who have
cultivated philosophies to apply to their own ? and our own ? lives: Show
me your garden and I shall tell you what you are." | |
|
Alfred Austin
|
|
| "The heart bowed down by weight of woe To weakest hope will
cling." | |
|
Alfred Bunn
|
|
| "The Japanese garden is a very important tool in Japanese
architectural design because, not only is a garden traditionally included
in any house design, the garden itself also reflects a deeper set of
cultural meanings and traditions. Whereas the English garden seeks to make
only an aesthetic impression, the Japanese garden is both aesthetic and
reflective. The most basic element of any Japanese garden design comes
from the realization that every detail has a significant value." | |
|
Elizabeth Barber
|
|
| "The kiss of the sun for pardon, The song of the birds for mirth, One
is nearer God?s Heart in a garden Than anywhere else on earth." | |
|
Dorothy Frances Gurney
|
|
| "The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the
latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as
we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man
after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown
wild oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods.
The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another
to dig) is as sure to come back to him, as he is sure, at last, to go
under the ground, and stay there." | |
|
Charles Dudley Warner
|
|
| "The practice of intensive manuring emerged as the dominant mark of
the Chinese system. All human and animal nitrogenous wastes were carefully
husbanded in large terra-cotta vats where they were aged, and then ladled
into irrigation ditches. Every 2,000 pounds of night soil provided 12.7
pounds of nitrogen, 4 pounds of potassium, and 1.7 pounds of phosphorus.
Ashes were added to this compost from any kind of fire." | |
|
Edwin T. Morris
|
|
| "The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation.
It becomes an obsession." | |
|
Phyllis McGinley
|
|
| "The word "garden" comes from the Old English "geard", meaning a
fence or enclosure, and from "garth" meaning a yard or a piece of enclosed
ground. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology gives the meaning of
garden as "enclosed cultivated ground" and The Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary as "an enclosed piece of ground devoted to the cultivation of
flowers, fruit or vegetables". Enclosure is essential to gardening, and
this raises fundamental questions, such as who is doing the enclosing, who
owns the land, and who is being kept out." | |
|
Martin Hoyles
|
|
| "Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it"s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders; And when
your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden, You will find
yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden." | |
|
Rudyard Kipling
|
|
| "There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where
colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than
ever again." | |
|
Elizabeth Lawrence
|
|
| "Therefore the sage is as pointed as a square but does not pierce. He
is as acute as a knife but does not cut. He is as straight as an unbent
line but does not extend. He is as bright as light but does not
dazzle." | |
|
Lao Tzu
|
|
| "This cabin, Mary, in my sight appears, Built as it has been in our
waning years, A rest afforded to our weary feet, Preliminary to ? the last
retreat." | |
|
William Cowper
|
|
| "Though one were fair as roses His beauty clouds and closes." | |
|
Algernon Charles Swinburne
|
|
| "Though there are other ways to finance your gardening, one sucessful
way is to choose carefully whom you marry. A good and generous man is
needed, one who knows how to make money and enjoys sharing it, one who
himself is not interested in the actual pursuit of gardening but likes to
be proud of the premises." | |
|
Emily Whaley
|
|
| "To a gardener there is nothing more exasperating than a hose that
just isn"t long enough." | |
|
Cecil Roberts
|
|
| "To cultivate a garden is to walk with God." | |
|
Christian Nestell Bovée
|
|
| "To garden, you open your personal space to admit a few, a great
many, 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." | |
|
Tom Clothier
|
|
| "To me, the garden is a doorway to other worlds; one of them, of
course, is the world of birds. The garden is their dinner table, bursting
with bugs and worms and succulent berries." | |
|
Anne Raver
|
|
| "To Nature the dweller in the Nile valley linked all that was dear to
him: his happiest fetes, poetry, and love ? all were bound up with the
garden and its products, especially flowers. Few Oriental nations can
think of a festival without flowers, but nowhere are they so completely a
part of human life, and so essential, as in [Ancient] Egypt." | |
|
M. L. Gothein
|
|
| "To these delights of a garden, age may add a further interest which
can hardly be distinguished from beauty, for the mind, at least with those
who have the historic instinct, is always longing to be connected with the
past, and dreading for itself confinement upon the plane of time, delights
in evidences of the long continuance of nations, families and institutions,
in hale and vigorous old age, in long-settled peace beyond the turn of
Fortune"s wheel, the "scornful dominion of accident." Restfulness is the
prevailing note of an old garden; in this fairy world of echo and
suggestion where the Present Age never comes but to commune with the Past,
we feel the glamour of a Golden Age, of a state of society just and secure
which has grown and blossomed as the rose." | |
|
Sir George Sitwell
|
|
| "Toward seven o"clock every morning, I leave my study and step Out on
the bright terrace; the sun already burns resplendent Between the shadows
of the fig tree, makes the low wall of coarse Granite warm to the touch.
Here my tools lie ready and waiting, Each one an intimate, an ally: the
round basket for weeds: The zappetta, the small hoe with a short haft ...
There"s a rake here as well, at at times a mattock and spade, Or two
watering cans filled with water warmed by the sun. With my basket and
small hoe in hand, facing the sun, I Go out for my morning walk." | |
|
Herman Hesse
|
|
| "Usually children spend more time in the garden than anybody else. It
is where they learn about the world, because they can be in it
unsupervised, yet protected. Some gardeners will remember from their own
earliest recollections that no one sees the garden as vividly, or cares
about it as passionately, as the child who grows up in it." | |
|
Carol Williams
|
|
| "We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs.
How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It
makes it so lifelike." | |
|
Evelyn Underhill
|
|
| "We use our gardens as a refuge, much as a painter uses canvas, as an
area to be created according to our own suitably reassuring, aesthetic
taste." | |
|
Henry H. Cabot
|
|
| "Weed ? a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." | |
|
Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
| "What a poor, impoverished world it would be that had no weeds to
defy man"s narrow idea of order or to suggest new possibilities to our
too-limited minds. Who can calculate the strength we receive when we see
and identify with a dandelion growing from a crack in the sidewalk to
bloom brightly amid adversity? It makes me feel that I should be capable
of just a bit more, when I see what weeds accomplish on what little they
receive." | |
|
Kay Haugaard
|
|
| "What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty
definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place." | |
|
Donald Culross Peattie
|
|
| "What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the
fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign
to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade." | |
|
Gertrude Jekyll
|
|
| "What, if anything, do the infinity of different traditional and
individual ideas of a garden have in common? They vary so much in purpose,
in size, in style and content that not even flowers, or even plants at all,
can be said to be essential. In the last analysis there is only one common
factor between all gardens, and this is the control of nature by man.
Control, that is, for aesthetic reasons.... The essence is control.
Without constant watchful care a garden - any garden - rapidly returns to
the state of the country all around it." | |
|
Hugh Johnson
|
|
| "When your garden is finished, I hope it will be more beautiful than
you anticipated, require less care that you had expected, and have cost
only a little more than you had planned." | |
|
Thomas D. Church
|
|
| "Who loves a garden Finds within his soul Life"s whole; He hears the
anthem of the soil While ingrates toil; And sees beyond his little sphere
The waving fronds of heaven, clear." | |
|
Lousie Seymour Jones
|
|
| "Whoe"er has travell"d life"s dull round, Where"er his stages may
have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an
inn." | |
|
William Shenstone
|
|
| "Will you not covet such power as this, and seek such throne as this,
and be no more housewives, but queens? There is no putting by that crown;
queens you must always be; queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands
and sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond.... But alas! you
are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least
things, while you abdicate it in the greatest." | |
|
John RUSKIN
|
|
| "Wyth a saw thou schalt the tre kytte And with a knyfe smouth make
hytte Klene a-tweyne the stok of the tre Where-yn that they graffe schall
be Make thy Kyttyng" of thy graffe By-twyne the newe & the olde
staffe." | |
|
John Gardener
|
|
| "You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there
they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can
be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity." | |
|
Hal Borland
|
|
| "You ought to know that October is the first Spring month." | |
|
Karel Capek
|
|
| "Yup, gardening and laughing are two of the best things in life you
can do to promote good health and a sense of well being." | |
|
David Hobson
|
|
| "[A sheared hedge] ... "signifies vision, persistence, and patience ?
qualities we crave in today"s world. Yet many people do make the
commitment. They create hedges, care for them eagerly, and gain much
satisfaction from the process. Why? Perhaps it"s because shaping a hedge
is the closest most of us will ever come to doing sculpture or erecting a
monument, but I think the real reward is more mundane. Shearing is very
empowering ? it gives you an exhilarating sense of control and
achievement. You can stand back afterward and say, look what I"ve
done." | |
|
Rita Buchanan
|