Girls, do not scrub and cook and scour until you have no time left to plant a tree, or vine, or flower. (1853)

- Jane G. Swissholm

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

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

- Frances Hodgson Burnett

Your first job is to prepare the soil. The best tool for this is your neighbor's garden tiller. If your neighbor does not own a garden tiller, suggest that he buy one.

- Dave Barry

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

- Alfred Austin

All through the long winter, I dream of my garden. On the first day of spring, I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth. I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar.

- Helen Hayes

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

- James Russell Lowell

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A flower is an educated weed.

- Luther Burbank

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth. "Garden Thoughts"

- Dorothy Frances Gurney

A garden is the best alternative therapy.

- Germaine Greer

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.

- Emily Dickinson

Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.

- Thomas Jefferson

No garden is without its weeds.

- Thomas Fuller



Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there. Gnomologia, 1732

- Thomas Fuller



May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

- Thich Nhat Hanh



Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

- Sir Walter Scott



Gardening requires lots of water -- most of it in the form of perspiration.

- Lou Erickson



Though an old man I am but a young gardener.

- Thomas Jefferson



On every stem, on every leaf ... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes



The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

- Phyllis McGinley



Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.

- Elizabeth Murray



The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

- Thomas Moore



How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.

- Benjamin Disraeli



Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying-out of gardens.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

- Marcel Proust



Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: -- "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.

- Rudyard Kipling



Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

- William Wordsworth



One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

- Wendell Berry



Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.

- Karel Capek



Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof.

- Julie Moir Messervy



I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.

- John Erskine



My garden will never make me famous,
I'm a horticultural ignoramus.

- Ogden Nash



Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvest reaps.

- Amos Bronson Alcott



I was determined to know beans. Walden

- Henry David Thoreau



Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

- Henry David Thoreau



A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

- May Sarton



Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

- Orson Scott Card



Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.

- Lewis Gannit



A garden is never so good as it will be next year

- Thomas Cooper



The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.

- Vita Sackville-West



Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.

- Vita Sackville-West



In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

- Margaret Atwood