Skip to content

The duty we owe to our gardens is to so use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; and that, while delighting our eyes.

— Gertrude Jekyll Colour in the Garden (1908)

Another quote →

Topics

Gardening

More quotes by Gertrude 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.

I am strongly of the opinion that possession of plants, however good, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection.

Colour in the Garden (1908)

To devise these living pictures with simple well-known flowers seems to me to be the best thing to do in gardening.

Colour in the Garden (1908)

Paint upon a palette, delighting our eyes with soul-satisfying pictures, a treasure of well set jewels a sympathy with growing things, fashioned into a dream of beauty, a place of perfect rest and refreshment of mind and body. This sense of beauty is a gift of God.

Colour in the Garden (1908)

I rejoice when I see any one, and especially children, inquiring about flowers, and wanting gardens of their own, and carefully working in them. For the love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, once sown never dies, but always grows and grows to an enduring and ever-increasing source of happiness.

All Gertrude Jekyll quotes →

You may also like

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

Show me your garden, provided it be your own, and I will tell you what you are like.

Alfred Austin The Garden That I Love (1894)

Nothing is more completely the child of art than a garden.

Walter Scott

We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

Eve

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gertrude Jekyll (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.