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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:

The Country is both the Philosopher’s Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

William Penn Fruits of Solitude (1682)

There is a fence around the garden
but the gate stands open.

Denise Levertov Footprints (1972)

I know
that if odour were visible as colour is, I'd see
the summer garden aureoled in rainbow clouds.

Robert Bridges The Testament of Beauty (1929)

Are you overwhelmed pulling weeds, when you really just need to replant the garden?

David Allen

Whenever I go to a botanical garden, I think of killing people with a spade.

Johannes Grenzfurthner

The world is an abstract art. We see it as we want to see it. It is a garden of roses and it is also a forest of thorny bushes and poison oak.

Baba Hari Dass Ashtanga Yoga Primer (1981)

Retired Leisure,
That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.

John Milton Il Penseroso (1631)

Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress'd with perfume,
Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul in her bloom.

Lord Byron The Bride of Abydos (1813)

I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there.

Kurt Vonnegut Cold Turkey (2004)

What is God after all ? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.

Sri Aurobindo Thoughts and Glimpses (1916)

More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar
Utterly this fair garden we might win.

George Meredith Modern Love (1862)

The whole world
became my garden!
But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden
when the sun strikes it
and the waves
are wakened.

William Carlos Williams

Adam, well may we labour, still to dress
This garden, still to tend plant, herb, and flower.

John Milton

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

Gertrude Stein Wars I Have Seen (1945)

Praying is another way of singing.
You plant in the tree the soul of lemons.
You plant in the gardens the spirit of roses.

Dannie Abse Poem Song for Dov Shamir in: Dannie Abse (1963)

Wherever the Legionary’s hand and soul show up, a garden appears.

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936)

I am strongly of the opinion that possession of plants, however good, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection.

Gertrude Jekyll Colour in the Garden (1908)

Loopier than a snake in a garden hose.

Malcolm Azania The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004)

The 114 chakras in the human body are like cosmic flowers, blooming in the celestial garden called the body.

Amit Ray The Science of 114 Chakras in Human Body (2015)

Lots of little old ladies potter in their gardens. For me it is my library. It has every subject about China I can collect, and of course about theatre.

Tsai Chin

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