In an unstable, disorienting, and often infuriating world, it can be the purest tonic to see your garden reliably spring to life and throw color around your garden.
Because of the intellectual stimulation and therapeutic benefits it provides, gardening has long attracted some of the world’s greatest thinkers. As a result, there is a wide variety of insightful, beautiful quotes about the gardening experience.
Gardening can be frustrating, but sometimes all you need is an inspirational quote to remind you why you started gardening in the first place, whether it is to get in touch with nature or for some greater spiritual release. In this article get some of the most popular quotes about gardening to start the season from writers and thinkers from around the world.
- The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul – Alfred Austin.
- Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle – Francis Cabot Lowell.
- No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden —Thomas Jefferson.
- The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerou —Rabindranath Tagore.
- One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides – W.E. Johns, The Passing Show.
- Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? – Douglas Adams.
- It is a good idea to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.” – James Douglas
- To an optimist every weed is a flower; to a pessimist every flower is a weed – American Saying.
- The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden – Stephen Gardiner.
- Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air — Georges Bernanos.
- The gardener who loves roses is slave to a thousand thorns – Tiriki Saying.
- Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace —May Sarton.
- When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden – Minnie Aumonier.
- A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them — Liberty Hyde Bailey.
- I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow— David Hobson.
- The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world— Michael Pollan.
- You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming – Pablo Neruda.
- A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust – Gertrude Jekyll.
- If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden – Robert Brault.
- Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That’s the fun of them. You’re always learning – Helen Mirren.
- A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in— Africa Saying.
- Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization— Daniel Webster.
- A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms – Zen Shin.
- The more help a person has in the garden, the less it belongs to him – W H Davies.
- The grass is greener where you water it —Neil Barringham.
- To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow —Audrey Hepburn.
- Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden —Robert Brault.
- The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness – Dalai Lama.
- Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul – Luther Burbank.
- The heart is the garden that always has room for the flowers of kindness and friendship to bloom— Amwoga Khalwale.
- There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments – Janet Kilburn Phillips.
- If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need — Marcus Tullius Cicero.
- Anyone who has time for drama is not gardening enough— Weldon Khalwale.
- Gardening is a work of a lifetime: you never finish — Oscar de la Renta.
- I thought I was pretty cool until I realized plants can eat the sun and poop out air — Jim Bugg.