Gardening Quotes:

No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.

- Alfred Austin

source: Alfred Austin (1906). “The Garden That I Love”

topic: Garden, Gardening, Self Made

There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.

- Alice B. Toklas

topic: Vegetables, Gardening, Gathering, Radishes

I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

- Alice Sebold

source: "Above and beyond". Interview with Katharine Viner, www.theguardian.com. August 23, 2002.

topic: Garden, Gardening, Needs, Gardening And God

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.

- Alice Walker

topic: Waiting, Gardening, Fruit, Willing To Wait

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.

- Allen Lacy

topic: People, Healthy, Gardening

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.

- Andy Goldsworthy

topic: Art, Car, Gardening, Decorating, Adverts

People who have not tried, know so much about gardening! - and so little.

- Anna Bartlett Warner

topic: People, Gardening, Littles

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.

- Audrey Hepburn

topic: Beautiful, People, Gardening, Something Beautiful, Respect People

Gardening has a magical quality when you are a child.

- Barbara Damrosch

source: Barbara Damrosch (1982). “Theme Gardens”, Workman Publishing Company

topic: Children, Garden, Gardening, Flowers And Gardens

Unfortunately, in the very act of weeding, you make it possible for new weeds to grow.

- Barbara Damrosch

source: Barbara Damrosch (2003). “The Garden Primer”, p.54, Rodale

topic: Weed, Gardening, Grows

Gardening is the best therapy in the world.

- C. Z. Guest

topic: Garden, Gardening, World

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

- Carolyn Murphy

topic: Hiking, Surfing, Gardening, Sunblock

The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life.

- Charles Saatchi

topic: Art, Criticism, Gardening, Art Critic

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.

- Chuck Palahniuk

topic: Ideas, Gardening, Momentum, Physically Active

I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.

- Claude Monet

topic: Two, Gardening, Painting

Gardening has just sort of grown on me. I find it therapeutic. And I like smelly things.

- Clive Anderson

topic: Gardening, Smelly, Therapeutic

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.

- Diane von Furstenberg

topic: Vision, Important, Gardening, Pruning

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.

- Eleanor Perenyi

topic: Temptation, Gardening, Faces

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?

- Eleanor Perenyi

topic: Flower, Years, Gardening, Threatened

There is some risk to increase birth defects if you do a lot of outdoor gardening when you are pregnant. That can increase rates of toxoplasmosis.

- Emily Oster

topic: Risk, Gardening, Birth, Birth Defects

I love being naked. I do everything in the nude, even the gardening! We're Cuban, and it's a hot island. Why not go nude?

- Eva Mendes

source: "Who are the sexiest women on the planet?". www.mirror.co.uk. February 14, 2010.

topic: Love Is, Islands, Gardening

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.

- Evagrius Ponticus

topic: Prayer, Men, Gardening

gardening is a madness and a rapture.

- Faith Sullivan

source: Faith Sullivan (2012). “What a Woman Must Do: A Novel”, p.11, Random House

topic: Gardening, Madness, Rapture

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.

- Gates McFadden

topic: Gardening, Architecture, Obsessive, Hairstyles, Hairdresser

Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job.

- George Bernard Shaw

topic: Jobs, Garden, Gardening

Gardening?is one of the most underrated aspects of diplomacy.

- George P. Bush

topic: Gardening, Aspect, Diplomacy

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

- Gertrude Jekyll

topic: Love, Garden, Gardening, Inspirational Gardening, Jekyll

The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but grows to the enduring happiness that the love of gardening gives.

- Gertrude Jekyll

topic: Giving, Gardening, Endure

To turn ordinary clothes into gardening clothes, simply mix with compost.

- Guy Browning

topic: Clothes, Gardening, Ordinary, Compost

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

source: Henry Mitchell (2014). “Henry Mitchell on Gardening”, p.150, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Long, Important, Gardening, Bayou, Long Road

Gardening is full of mistakes, almost all of them pleasant and some of them actually instructive.

- Henry Mitchell

source: Henry Mitchell (1999). “One Man's Garden”, p.34, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Mistake, Gardening, Pleasant

Gardening gloves are for sissies. I always have dirt under my nails.

- Hilarie Burton

topic: Gardening, Nails, Gloves, Sissy

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.

- J. B. Smoove

topic: Wife, House, Gardening, Mailman

[Gardening] is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude without being thought unsociable.

- Jan Struther

source: Jan Struther (1956). “A pocketful of pebbles”

topic: Mean, Solitude, Gardening

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

- Jan Struther

source: Jan Struther (1940). “Mrs. Miniver”

topic: Gardening, Metaphor, Worst

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.

- Jane Pauley

source: "Jane Pauley tackles reinvention". The SecondAct Interview, blogs.reuters.com. August 16, 2011.

topic: Nbc, People, Gardening, Interpersonal, Nbc News

When you plant early, you bring spring early.

- Jean Hersey

source: Jean Hersey (1967). “The Shape of a Year”

topic: Spring, Gardening, Plant

At home, I relax by gardening, or just pottering.

- Jennifer Saunders

source: "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Home, Gardening, Relax

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

source: John Evelyn (1729). “Silva: or, a discourse of forest-trees, and the propagation of timber in His Majesty's dominions”

topic: Educational, Gardening, Satisfaction

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

- Kim Wilde

topic: Horse, Gardening, Overwhelmed

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

- Luis Barragan

topic: Gardening, Landscape, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Architecture And Art

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

- Mabel Osgood Wright

topic: Color, Gardening, Green

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.

- Margaret Atwood

topic: What Matters, Hands, Gardening, Immersion

My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.

- Margaret Bourke-White

topic: Weed, Ideas, Gardening

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.

- Margery Fish

source: Margery Fish (2011). “We Made a Garden”, p.39, Pavilion Books

topic: Baby, Important, Gardening, Pruning

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

- Mark Z. Danielewski

topic: People, Gardening, Stuff, Toothpaste

Gardening is a humbling experience.

- Martha Stewart

topic: Garden, Gardening, Humbling Experiences

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

- Mary McCarthy

topic: Gardening, Facts, Sometimes, Sometimes Love

Gardening is certainly the next amusement to reading.

- Mary Wortley Montagu

source: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1856). “The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”, p.376

topic: Reading, Gardening, Next

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

- May Sarton

topic: Grace, Gardening, Instruments

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

- May Sarton

topic: Gardening, Going Away, Age

To garden is a solitary act.

- Michelle Cliff

source: Michelle Cliff (1980). “Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise”

topic: Garden, Gardening, Solitary

If you would be happy all your life, plant a garden.

- Nan Fairbrother

topic: Garden, Gardening, Would Be, Planting A Garden

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

- Oscar de la Renta

topic: Passion, Gardening, Adore

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

- Patience Strong

source: Patience Strong (1951). “The Glory of the Garden”

topic: Gardening, Pastime

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

- Patience Strong

source: Patience Strong (1951). “The Glory of the Garden”

topic: Struggle, Gardening

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!

- Philippe Kahn

topic: Play, Gardening, Trying, World Problems

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

topic: Spiritual, Soul, Gardening, Presenting

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

- Rudyard Kipling

topic: Gardening, Done, Half

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

- Siddhartha Mukherjee

topic: Cells, Gardening, Littles

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

- Simon Baker

topic: Gardening, Feels, Constructive

I don't hold that everybody has to love fashion. Some people like gardening.

- Steven Cojocaru

topic: Fashion, People, Gardening, Love Fashion

The real lowdown on gardening is ... dirt.

- Texas Bix Bender

source: Texas Bix Bender (1999). “Don't Throw in the Trowel”, Gramercy Books

topic: Real, Gardening, Earth

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

- Theodore Roethke

source: Theodore Roethke (2006). “Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63”, p.179, Copper Canyon Press

topic: Moving, Religion, Gardening

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

- Thomas Berry

topic: Gardening, Mystery, Participation, Active Participation

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.

- Timothy Leary

topic: Time, Soul, Gardening, Self Realisation

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

- Toby Hemenway

topic: Animal, Gardening, Earth

I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology.

- Vigen Guroian

source: Vigen Guroian (2001). “Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening”, p.106, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

topic: Thinking, Religion, Gardening

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

- Vita Sackville-West

topic: Gardening, Would Be, Gardener

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.

- Vita Sackville-West

topic: Two, Luxury, Gardening

But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung ...

- Vita Sackville-West

source: Vita Sackville-West, Victoria Sackville-West (2004). “The Garden”, Frances Lincoln Limited

topic: Color, Gardening, Use

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

- Vita Sackville-West

topic: Cat, Gardening, Nine

Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.

- Vita Sackville-West

topic: Successful, Gardening, Taste

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.

- William Cowper

topic: Garden, Gardening, Greenhouses, Garden Love

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.

- David E. Cooper

source: Source: www.3ammagazine.com

topic: Humility, Practice, Gardening

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.

- Jim Nollman

topic: Love, Rocks, Gardening, Human Family

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.

- Lauren Bowles

topic: Writing, Creative, Gardening

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.

- P. J. O'Rourke

topic: People, Gardening, Want, Zealot, Unicef

Enlightenment is just another word for feeling comfortable with being a completely ordinary person.

- Veronique Vienne

topic: Feelings, Gardening, Enlightenment

Gardening is, apart from having children, the most rewarding thing in life

- Alan Titchmarsh

topic: Children, Things In Life, Gardening

Computers, singing, reading, painting and gardening are my hobbies.

- Arfa Karim

source: Source: arfakarim.wordpress.com

topic: Reading, Singing, Gardening

What's a butterfly garden without butterflies?

- Roy Rogers

topic: Butterfly, Garden, Gardening, Social Butterfly

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.

- Janet Macunovich

topic: Weather, Gardening, Mystery

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.

- Ken Thompson

topic: Jobs, Reading, Gardening, Academic Work

I bought an ant farm. I don't know where I am going to get a tractor that small!

- Steven Wright

topic: Funny, Gardening, Ants, Tractors

Apart from painting and gardening, I'm not good at anything.

- Claude Monet

source: Claude Monet (2007). “Monet: a visit to Giverny”

topic: Gardening, Painting

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

- Mae West

topic: Funny, Gardening, Lambs

I know of no common interest that exceeds gardening as a source of lifelong friendships, nor as a means of making new friends almost constantly.

- Allen Lacy

topic: Mean, Gardening, Common, Making New Friends

Gardening transcends everything that otherwise divides us.

- Allen Lacy

topic: Gardening, Divides

Gardening is in large measure a phenomenon of attention.

- Allen Lacy

topic: Gardening, Attention, Phenomenon

In addition to all its rich offerings to the body and its five senses, gardening engages the mind.

- Allen Lacy

topic: Offering, Mind, Gardening

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

- Georg C. Lichtenberg

source: "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook G 46, 1799.

topic: Religion, Important, Gardening

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.

- Margaret Fuller

topic: Art, Gardening, Doe

The market is the best garden.

- George Herbert

source: George Herbert (1871). “The English poems of George Herbert, together with his collection of proverbs entitled Jacula prudentum”, p.245

topic: Garden, Gardening

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.

- Dan Buettner

source: Source: www.cbc.ca

topic: Moving, Fall, Gardening

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.

- Andrew Weil

source: "10 Ways to Have a Happier Life" by Dr. Andrew Weil, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 8, 2011.

topic: Home, Exercise, Gardening, Home Improvement

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.

- Marine Le Pen

topic: Children, Believe, Gardening

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.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

source: Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.636, Modern Library

topic: Reading, Gardening, Genius

Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes or celebrity chefs?

- David Attenborough

source: "David Attenborough criticises BBC schedule". www.telegraph.co.uk. May 1, 2008.

topic: Gardening, Television, Chef, Makeovers

To dwell is to garden.

- Martin Heidegger

topic: Garden, House, Gardening

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.

- Mary Norris

source: Mary Norris (2015). “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

topic: Jobs, Singing, Gardening, Shipping, Mozzarella

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.'

- Ricky Gervais

source: "Ricky Gervais: The ESQ+A". Interview with Cott Raab, www.esquire.com. January 12, 2012.

topic: Funny Inspirational, Gardening, World

We are the ancestors of those gardening the universe.

- Vanna Bonta

source: "Space: what love’s got to do with it" by Vanna Bonta, www.thespacereview.com. October 25, 2004.

topic: Gardening, Ancestor, Universe

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

- May Sarton

topic: Grace, Gardening, Instruments

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

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

topic: Childhood, Religion, Gardening

there is nothing like a garden to rest the soul.

- Barbara Mertz

topic: Garden, Soul, Gardening

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

- Meister Eckhart

topic: Religion, Gardening, Stones

Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That's the fun of them. You're always learning.

- Helen Mirren

source: Interview with Anne Brodie, me.askmen.com.

topic: Fun, Gardening, Always Learning

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.

- Henry David Thoreau

source: Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.403, Penguin

topic: Strength, Nature, Gardening, Sacred Places

Nature abhors a garden.

- Michael Pollan

source: "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World". Book by Michael Pollan, www.nytimes.com. 2001.

topic: Garden, Gardening

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

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

topic: Thinking, Religion, Gardening

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.

- Jack Kornfield

source: Jack Kornfield (2008). “The Wise Heart: Buddhist Psychology for the West”, p.203, Random House

topic: Inspirational, Spiritual, Gardening, Spiritual Path

Some keep the Sabbath going to church, I keep it staying at home, with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome.

- Emily Dickinson

source: c.1860 Complete Poems, no.324 (first published 1864).

topic: Nature, Home, Gardening, Going To Church, Orchard

Writer's block is a myth. I never see the gardeners suffering from gardening block.

- Emo Philips

source: "Emo Philips" by Sanjiv Bhattacharya, www.theguardian.com. July 1, 2006.

topic: Block, Suffering, Gardening

I like gardening. I'm really a nature man. I spend as much time as I can in nature. I feel really safe there.

- Lars von Trier

source: Source: editorial.rottentomatoes.com

topic: Men, Gardening, Safe

The destruction of all Shadowhunters' said Scott. 'I rather thought you knew that. It isn't a gardening club.

- Cassandra Clare

source: Cassandra Clare (2013). “The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess”, p.677, Simon and Schuster

topic: Gardening, Clubs, Destruction, Shadowhunters

A garden is a friend you can visit any time.

- Okakura Kakuzo

topic: Garden, Gardening, Garden Love, Friendship Garden

Cares melt when you kneel in your garden.

- Okakura Kakuzo

topic: Garden, Care, Gardening, Vegetable Garden, Garden Love