Top 87 Gardening Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 87 of the best gardening quotes ever written, picked out of the full gardening archive on QuoteForever. You will find May Sarton, Ken Thompson, Luis Barragan and Oscar De La Renta among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

Gardening is the best therapy in the world.

2

I'm not surfing much anymore, but I love hiking and gardening, and I'm always wearing a hat and sunblock.

3

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.

4

Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden.

5

I have spoken to plants myself, and if pressed for conclusions would have to say that those I threatened did better than those I - well, I wouldn't say prayed over, but pleaded with, cajoled. A rhododendron that hadn't bloomed for six years was flatly told it would be removed the following year if there were no flowers. Need I say that it has bloomed profusely ever since?

6

My neighbour asked if he could use my lawnmower and I told him of course he could, so long as he didn't take it out of my garden.

7

One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?

8

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.

9

The garden that is finished is dead.

10

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

11

My extravagance is my garden - it's the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.

12

The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.

13

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

14

For most of that time, I've also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.

15

I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!

16

Gardening is not something to get on your high horse about or be overwhelmed by. Either you enjoy it or you don't.

17

The source of nature is spirit.

18

I feel so fortunate to get paid to be an actor. I pinch myself. I get it from writing, I get it from baking, gardening... I sort of open myself to the creative flow, which is hard to do, by the way.

19

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

20

it is really astonishing how few colors are inharmonious when they are profusely massed and have green for a background.

21

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

22

Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissingthe tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.

23

If I didn't believe that we had a chance of coming to power, then I would have focused on taking care of my three children or gardening.

24

No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff.

25

I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.

26

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

27

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

28

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

29

The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.

30

The Herbs ought to be distilled when they are in their greatest vigor, and so ought the Flowers also.

31

A garden is a friend you can visit any time.

32

Gardening is how I relax. It's another form of creating and playing with colors.

33

I adore gardening, and whenever I have time off, that is my passion.

34

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.

35

much of gardening is a struggle against the fecundity of Nature.

36

gardening is something more than a pastime; it is a religion.

37

Everyone wants instant everything, and they want instant success, but I always think you should treat things in the arts like a garden, and let them grow.

38

Trying to solve the worlds problems by making things 5% more efficient is like trying to play the violin with gardening gloves. Not much good will come out of it. We must invent new ways!

39

The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's duties.

40

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.

41

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

42

You should bring something into the world that wasn't in the world before. It doesn't matter what that is. It doesn't matter if it's a table or a film or gardening-everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say 'I did that.'

43

I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me.

44

One marked feature of the people, both high and low, is a love for flowers.

45

Sometimes, as is the case of peach and plum trees, which are often dwarfed, the plants are thrown into a flowering states, and then, as they flower freely year after year, they have little inclination to make vigorous growth.

46

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

47

Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade.

48

Adam was a gardener, and God, who made him, sees that half of all good gardening is done upon the knees.

49

I'm pretty good at gardening. It consumes my time, and it feels like I'm doing something constructive.

50

The real lowdown on gardening is ... dirt.

51

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

52

From plants that wake when others sleep, from timid jasmine buds that keep their odour to themselves all day, but when the sunlight dies away let the delicious secret out to every breeze that roams about.

53

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.

54

Vegetarians may be appalled, but much of gardening is actually raising animals: the tiny ones under the earth's surface

55

We are the ancestors of those gardening the universe.

56

I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology.

57

It's true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else.

58

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

59

There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.

60

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

61

I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

62

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.

63

All gardening is landscape painting.

64

Garden as though you will live forever.

65

The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.

66

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

67

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

68

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.

69

Use plants to bring life.

70

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

71

You have to get up and plant the seed and see if it grows, but you can't just wait around, you have to water it and take care of it.

72

If you build up the soil with organic material, the plants will do just fine.

73

He plants trees to benefit another generation.

74

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

75

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

76

A brier rose whose buds yield fragrant harvest for the honey bee.

77

I enjoy painting, cutting the lawn and working in the garden when I have time. That's therapy for me. I enjoy working with my hands.

78

A garden must combine the poetic and the mysterious with a feeling of serenity and joy.

79

The more help a person has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.

80

A weed is but an unloved flower.

81

If a person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.

82

But if each man could have his own house, a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings - then, I thought, there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life.

83

There is nothing I like better at the end of a hot summer's day than taking a short walk around the garden. You can smell the heat coming up from the earth to meet the cooler night air.

84

Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.

85

Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path.

86

I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation.

87

I love decorating my home. I'm a gardener too, so that's usually something I have to play catch up with.

More Gardening quotes

This is the short list. The full gardening quotes collection holds every quote on the subject in the archive, and the picture quotes are ready to share as images.

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