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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.

Random quote on Gardening

Most quoted on gardening:

A little garden little Jowett made,
And fenced it with a little palisade;
A little taste hath little Dr. Jowett;
This little garden doth a little show it.

Richard Porson

Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suff'ring eye inverted nature sees,
Trees cut in statues, statues thick as trees;
With here a fountain never to be play'd,
And there a summer-house that knows no shade.

Alexander Pope

Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Maud; A Monodrama (1855)

[N]one but a poet could have made such a garden.

Samuel Johnson

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.

Gertrude Jekyll

The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly not that which is rather forest or field than garden, the 'landscape garden' of false taste; nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed and weeded parterre with an unstarred lawn; but rather the garden long ago strictly planned, rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and delicate, but later set free, given over to time and the sun; not a wilderness, but having an enclosed wilderness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence and excess.

Alice Meynell The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (1921)

The best way to apologize to a man is to trip him in a secluded part of the garden.

Robert Jordan Lord of Chaos (1994)

More and more people are becoming aware of herbs and appreciating the pleasure these plants give in the garden, kitchen and for cosmetics, medicines and repellents around the house. I couldn't live without my herb garden.

Jane Edmanson Jane Edmanson's Favourite Plants (1995)

I had plenty of LSD, but why take it. I knew what it was going to do, what it was going to tell me. It was going to show me that garden again and then I was going to be cast out and that was it.

Ram Dass Be Here Now (1971)

A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.

Samuel Johnson Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

Verily, there needs a gardener, and many gardens.

Louis Sullivan Kindergarten Chats (1918)

Today's Xiamen is a beautiful garden city, and we hope Kaohsiung will get better as well.

Han Kuo-yu Han Kuo-yu (2019)

You're a bud covered in snow in the garden of your mind. Just wait for spring.

Connor Franta Note to Self (2017)

Once learn how Nature gardens for herself, and you will be able to spare yourself a good deal of trouble.

Alfred Austin The Garden That I Love (1894)

The fairest garden in her looks,
And in her mind the wisest books.

Abraham Cowley Works (1668)

A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.

W. Somerset Maugham Red (1921)

Man must be a co-worker with God in making this earth a garden.

Joseph H. Hertz

In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.

Lewis H. Lapham Waiting For The Barbarians (1997)

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.

Voltaire

That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden.

Timothy Leary Start your own Religion (1967)

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