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:
“The woman is the subtlest beast in the garden,” said Papa Moose, “now that snakes can’t talk.”
No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
God gave His children memory
That in life's garden there might be
June roses in December.
If the husband sits on a chair in the Garden of Eden, his wife is his footstool.
Like to These garden-glories, which here be
The flowery-sweet resemblances of thee.
"No one who has an atom's weight of pride in his heart will enter the Garden [heaven]."
High poet, pride of the English squires,
I would be just a nettle in your garden.
If heaven send no supplies,
The fairest blossom of the garden dies.