Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they'll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
I love a lot of things, and I'm pretty much obsessive about most things I do, whether it be gardening, or architecture, or music. I'd be an obsessive hairdresser.
Gardening is a cooperative affair. I am a part of a neighborhood in which plants, dirt, rocks and a human family participate collectively in a love affair with place.
If your spirit still looks around at the time of prayer, then it does not yet pray as a monk. You are no better than a man of affairs engaged in a kind of landscape gardening.
A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.
I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture.
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.
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.
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.
Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy.
My life is gardening, cleaning around the house and power washing. I power wash everything: my wife, the mailman with the f-cking mail, power wash his ass, f-ck my mail up, I don't care.
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!
Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.
Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?
Firmness in all aspects is a most important quality when gardening, not only in planting but in pruning, dividing and tying up. Plants are like babies, they know when an amateur is handling them.
I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.
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.
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.
History is everything in gardening: With a site, weather, a particular plant. It solves mysteries. And it's why, when others say, "You can't do that!" you can know with deepest certainty that you can.
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.
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.
I am a particular fan of integrative exercise - that is, exercise that occurs in the course of doing some productive activity such as gardening, bicycling to work, doing home improvement projects and so on.
What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation...we must follow what brings us alive.
When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.
I read, go for walks and I love to garden. My hands are such a mess. People think I should have movie star hands, but they're just gardening ones. Always slightly grubby and with a bit of dirt under the fingernails.
When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
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.
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.
No one will understand a Japanese garden until you've walked through one, and you hear the crunch underfoot, and you smell it, and you experience it over time. Now there's no photograph or any movie that can give you that experience.
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.
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.
Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are 'internal'. Good gardening requires a certain goodness on the part of the gardener: care, humility, patience, and respect, for example.
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.'
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.
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.
The beauty of moving naturally, i.e. walking and gardening, is they're low impact. You're less likely to fall down and break a hip. Setting up your life so you're nudged into general physical activity every day is a strategy for your entire life from age 10 to 100.
My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.
The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.
Who does not observe the immediate glow and security that is diffused over the life of woman, before restless or fretful, by engaging in gardening, building, or the lowest department of art? Here is something that is not routine--something that draws forth life towards the infinite.
Clarity is the most important thing. I can compare clarity to pruning in gardening. You know, you need to be clear. If you are not clear, nothing is going to happen. You have to be clear. Then you have to be confident about your vision. And after that, you just have to put a lot of work in.
I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news, but in hindsight, I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.
Show me a person without prejudice of any kind on any subject and I'll show you someone who may be admirably virtuous but is surely no gardener. Prejudice against people is reprehensible, but a healthy set of prejudices is a gardener's best friend. Gardening is complicated, and prejudice simplifies it enormously.
Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings - sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.
The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.
One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience.
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.
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?