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 gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
He's as great a master of ill language as ever was bred at a Bear-Garden.
"In the garden of ethics, even the smallest weeds can choke out the tallest flowers."
It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar.
I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.