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:
Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walked without a mate.
My delight and thy delight
Walking, like two angels white,
In the gardens of the night.
Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps;
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.
Though many a rose in this garden is born
No mortal who culls one escapes from the thorn.
He that hath eaten a bear-pie, will always smell of the garden.
I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.
Don't even step out of your garden gate until this matter has been clarified.
I painted only [in pure colours] at Arcueil and at the Luxembourg Gardens.
Thy promises are like Adonis' gardens
That one day bloomed and fruitful were the next.