Gardening Quotes - Page 20

• Gardening is like everything else in life, you get out of it as much as you put in. No one can make a garden by buying a few packets of seeds or doing an afternoon's weeding. You must love it, and then your love will be repaid a thousandfold, as every gardener knows.

  Margery Fish

  Weed, Garden, Afternoon

  Margery Fish (2011). “We Made a Garden”, p.54, Pavilion Books

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• Gardening is always more or less a warfare against nature. It is true we go over to the 'other side' for a few hints, but we might as well abandon our spades and pitchforks as pretend that nature is everything and art nothing.

  Shirley Hibberd

  Art, Nature, Garden

  James Shirley Hibberd (1871). “The amateur's flower garden”, p.223

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• We should be rolling in the dirt, gardening, wrestling with some brambles and skinning animals for supper. These are important immune system builders.

  Joel Salatin

  Wrestling, Animal, Important

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• What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.

  Victor Hugo

  Beautiful, Stars, Flower

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• All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.

  Theodore Roethke

  Memories, Men, Shine On

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• The atmosphere of our time is fast being cleared of the fumes and deadly gases that arose during the carboniferous age of theology.

  John Burroughs

  Time, Garden, Atmosphere

  John Burroughs (1904). “The writings of John Burroughs”

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• Spirituality points, always, beyond: beyond the ordinary, beyond possession, beyond the narrow confines of the self, and - above all - beyond expectations. Because "the spiritual" is beyond our control, it is never exactly what we expect.

  Ernest Kurtz

  Spiritual, Self, Expectations

  Ernest Kurtz, Katherine Ketcham (2009). “The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning”, p.31, Bantam

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• Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.

  Diane Ackerman

  Sex, Latin, Vocabulary

  Diane Ackerman (2002). “Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden”, G K Hall & Company

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• Many talk about a guest worker program. I think most reasonable people believe that a guest worker program in the farming industry, perhaps in the gardening and landscape industries, is reasonable.

  Gary Miller

  Believe, Thinking, Agriculture

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• In this light, my spirit saw through all things and into all creatures and I recognized God in grass and plants.

  Jakob Bohme

  Garden, Light, Religion

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• Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.

  Christian Wiman

  Garden, Religion, Backyards

  Christian Wiman (2013). “Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet”, p.147, Copper Canyon Press

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• Thinking the deed, and not the creed, Would help us in our utmost need.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Thinking, Religion, Needs

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.360, Library of America

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• I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don't like to get my knees dirty. I don't have a garden.

  Nick Cave

  Dirty, Garden, Knees

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• Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living. It uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers

  Bill Mollison

  Technology, Creating, Urban Renewal

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• In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Childhood, Religion, Spirit

  Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Griffiths Belt (2002). “Last stand: America's virgin lands”, National Geographic

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• March isn't the only thing that's in like a lion and out like a lamb.

  Mae West

  Funny, Lambs, Lions

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• A stranger here Strange things doth meet, strange glories see; Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear, Strange all, and new to me. But that they mine should be, who nothing was, That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

  Thomas Traherne

  Religion, World, Treasure

  The Salutation (published 1903).

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• Gardening is an active participation in The deepest mysteries of the universe.

  Thomas Berry

  Garden, Religion, Spirit

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• Then all at once in late August's heat, tall leafless stalks crowned with iridescent pink and purple blossoms burst from the purgatory in the earth. This arcane act of nature, though perceived by us as ordinary, is a manifestation of Maya's phantom play, the great immensity expressed in every way. My garden is the universe. I am the universe. I am my garden. All things are the same.

  Duane Michals

  Garden, Purple, August

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• Everything in this world has a hidden meaning, I thought. Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics; woe to anyone who begins to decipher them and guess what they mean.... When you see them, you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. It is only years later, too late, that you understand.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Stars, Animal, Men

  "Zorba the Greek".

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

  Meister Eckhart

  Religion, Stones, Woods

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• It would never occur to most of us that 'plants' say anything at all, except in terms of what we read into them, or try to use them for. Yet in their responses to this wonderfully rhythmic and varying earth they are the most expressive of all forms of life.

  John Hay

  Religion, Say Anything, Trying

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• It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

  Wallace Stevens

  Religion, Spirit, Spirituality

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.183, Vintage

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• In a field I am the absence of field.That is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the space where my body has been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.

  Mark Strand

  Moving, Garden, Air

  "Keeping Things Whole" l. 14 (1969)

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• Natural objects themselves, even when they make no claim to beauty, excite the feelings, and occupy the imagination. Nature pleases, attracts, delights, merely because it is nature. We recognize in it an Infinite Power.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Garden, Imagination, Feelings

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