Gardening Quotes
The writer with the most entries is Alfred Austin, the Victorian poet laureate, whose The Garden That I Love (1894) is the main source: show me your garden, provided it is your own, and I will tell you what you are like. Tennyson, Gertrude Jekyll, Cowley and Marvell follow. Milton’s Il Penseroso (1631) has leisure taking its pleasure in trim gardens.
Three entries are flagged. A line about the glory of gardening, hands in the dirt and head in the sun, is credited to Austin and is disputed; it sounds more like a modern caption than something from 1894. A verse about Adam and Eve planting another garden is credited to Edward German, and Bismarck is credited with a joke about the Dutch and the Irish; both are marked misattributed.
Most quoted on gardening:
Show me your garden, provided it be your own, and I will tell you what you are like.
In laying out a garden, the first and chief thing to be considered is the genius of the place.
And add to these retired Leisure,
That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.
[E]xclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.
An album is a garden, not for show
Planted, but use; where wholesome herbs should grow.
The garden lies,
A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream.
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.