Quotes on Gardening
Welcome to our collection of gardening quotes. For those of you looking for the perfect quote on gardening – here are some good ones! If you have you’d like to add (or know the author of one of the quotes), please write us .
As a wise farmer once said: “The best addition to our gardens is our footprints applied daily as we spend time caring for our crops”.
“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.”
– Rudyard Kipling, “The Glory of the Garden”
“The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.”
– Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
“No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green it wakes into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted to the sower to live to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith.”
– Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, 1952
“How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence.”
– Benjamin Disraeli
“Where you have a plot of land, however small, plant a garden. Staying close to the soil is good for the soul.”
– Spencer W. Kimball
“Like a big mountain, a small garden stimulates, restores, and delights us, just as it poses challenges, promotes mastery, provides exercise and relieves monotony.”
– The Power of Place, Winifred Gallagher
“”If you really want to draw close to your garden, you must remember first of all that you are dealing with a being that lives and dies; like the human body, with its poor flesh, its illnesses at times repugnant. One must not always see it dressed up for a ball, manicured and immaculate.”
– Fernand Lequenne, Botanist
“When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden.”
– Minnie Aumonier
“There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.”
– Mirabel Osler
“The best way to garden is to put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and some old clothes. And with a hoe in one hand and a cold drink in the other, tell someone else where to dig.”
– Texas Bix Bender
And if you’ve never heard of Joel Salatin notable as an outspoken advocate of “slow food” or buying local…
- “How dare you treat your soil like dirt!”
– Joel Salatin - “If you think organic food is expensive, have you priced cancer lately?”
– Joel Salatin - “You can’t chemical your way out of soil infertility” – Joel Salatin
‘All gardeners live in beautiful places, because they make them so.’
– Joseph Joubert
But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit. Weeds are people’s idea, not nature’s.
– Anonymous
“Population will increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and ‘ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.”
– Doug Larson
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”
– Dwight David Eisenhower
“Food is fabricated soil fertility.”
– William A. Albrecht
Recently I found some good gardening quotes from a speaker at the Master Gardeners meeting where I live.
His name is Felder Rushing.
- “Most gardeners are daunted, not dumb.”
- “Lightening up doesn’t necessarily mean lowering your standards.”
- “I DO care what the neighbors think… it just doesn’t MATTER!”
- “Doesn’t matter what you do, or how you do it, your neighbors are gonna talk about you ANYWAY.” (this quoted aloud and credited to Felder by Martha Stewart)
- “Life already has so many boundaries and pressures – why add more in the garden?”
- “Salsa is good for your body; tomato gravy is for your Southern SOUL.” (Plus, a little grease in the diet helps you slide through the humidity better.)
“Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
– Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“… the code is more what you’d call guidelines, than actual rules…”
– Captain Barbossa
“Many things can be preserved in alcohol. Dignity is NOT one of them.”
– Charlotte Jem
“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
– Lou Holtz
Some of the best gardening quotes ever recorded are from such famous gardeners as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson
- “Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocketbook not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.”
– George Washington - "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God."
– Thomas Jefferson - "Though an old man, I am but a young gardener."
– Thomas Jefferson
“Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing ‘Oh how wonderful’ and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out, and start their working lives
By grubbing weeds from garden paths with broken dinner knives.”
– Rudyard Kipling
“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”
– Willa Cather
“No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between a man and a plot of land.”
– Henry Ford
“To see things in the seed, that is genius.”
– Lao-tzu
“This time, like all times,is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness.
The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head …
The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart
from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on.”
– Robert Finch, Poet
“We have resolved to endure the unendurable and suffer what is insufferable.”
– Emperor Hirohito
“The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare.”
– Juma Ikangaa
“The fear of suffering is often worse than the suffering itself.”
– Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist
“Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Good is the enemy of great.”
– Volataire
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough –
Without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
– D.H. Lawrence
“We will either find a way or make one.
– Hannibal, 247 – 183 BC Carthaginian general
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
– Rachel Carson
“Whosoever believes agriculture is unsophisticated, a conglomerate of hayseed mentalities, merely a carryover from yesteryear and of little importance, those persons would be just that.”
– A.O. Kime
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
– H. H. Williams
“Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
– Rachel Carson
Some “growing” humor!
Women are like fine wine. They all start out fresh, fruity, and intoxicating to the mind, and then turn full-bodied with age until they go all sour and vinegary and give you a headache.
– Male Author Unknown
Men are like a fine wine. They all start out like grapes, and it’s our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you’d want to have dinner with.
– Female Author Unknown
The Hapless Gardener’s Glossary of Terms
Toooooooo Funny!
“It’s a sign of wisdom that seeds don’t squander their energy all at once, instead calmly waiting until the time is right. Seeds aren’t stupid.”
– Midas Dekkers
“The Way of All Flesh” in “Romance of Ruins”
The difference between weeds and flowers is the flowers are the easiest ones to pull out.
“Prevention is so much better than healing because it saves the labor of being sick.”
– Thomas Adams; 17th century English preacher
There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
– Author Unknown
“Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people’s property.”
– G.K. Chesterton, 1932
“Stand in the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”
– Jeremiah 6:16
“How many people on Earth serve people? And how many people on Earth serve the Earth? The difference
in the numbers must be enormous. It would reveal that the Earth is definitely not the primary concern of the human species. This might be fatal both to the Earth and to humanity. Please, leaders of the Earth and the nations, wake up to this potentially fatal disparity.”
– Robert Muller
If you cross a rambling rose with a pansy, you get a rose that still rambles, but it also skips!
One good thing about rutabagas is that they provide something for turnips to taste better than….
“Like a big mountain, a small garden stimulates, restores, and delights us, just as it poses challenges, promotes mastery, provides exercise and relieves monotony.”
– The Power of Place, Winifred Gallagher
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
– Greek proverb
"I’m not really a career person. I’m a gardener, basically."
– George Harrison
"He who plants a seed beneath the sod and waits to see a plant, believes in God."
"The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies."
– Gertrude Jekyll
"The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world."
– Vita Sackville-West
"Earth laughs in flower."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments."
– Janet Kilburn Phillips
"Cares melt when you kneel in your garden."
"A garden is a friend you can visit any time."
"Friends are flowers in life’s garden."
"In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends."
– Kozuko Okakura
"The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work."
– G.K. Chesterton, NY Sun 11-3-18
"Flowers are beautiful hieroglyphics of nature, with which she indicates how much she loves us."
– Wolfgang von Geothe
"If you have a mind at peace, a heart that cannot harden, go find a door that opens wide upon a lovely garden."
"I garden, therefore I am."
"In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous."
– Aristotle
"Kiss of the sun for pardon. Song of the birds for mirth. You’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than any place else on earth."
– Dorothy Frances Gurney
"Don’t grumble that roses have thorns, be thankful that thorns have roses."
"What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet."
– William Shakespeare
"When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, There is always the garden."
– Minnie Aumonier
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
– Francis Bacon
"Cultivate the garden within."
"I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden."
– John Erskine
"But each spring…a gardening instinct, sure as the sap rising in the trees, stirs within us. We look about and decide to tame another little bit of ground."
– Lewis Gantt
"A weed is only a misplaced plant."
"What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place."
– Donald Culross Peattie
"What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
– Emerson
"Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."
– Henry David Thoreau
"The garden is a mirror of the heart."
"One who plants a garden, plants happiness."
"He who plants a tree, plants a hope."
"He who plants a tree loves others besides himself."
"As Rosemary is to the spirit, so Lavender is to the soul."
"As the Garden Grows, so does the Gardener"
"To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves."
"Nothing is more the child of art than a garden."
– Sir Walter Scott
"You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt."
"Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul."
– The Koran
"In the Garden, my soul is sunshine."
"We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden."
"A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul."
– Sadi
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
– Marcel Proust
"So many seeds — so little time."
"Where but in a garden do summer hours pass so quickly?"
"Tickle the earth with a hoe, it will laugh a harvest."
"Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor’s."
– Mary Cantwell
"All gardeners know better than other gardeners."
– Chinese Proverb
"The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession."
– Phyllis McGinley
"An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life."
"Always remember the beauty of the garden, for there is peace."
“The only thing that endures over time is the ‘Law of the Farm.’ You must prepare the ground, plant the seed, cultivate, and water if you expect to reap the harvest.”
– Stephen R. Covey
“Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.”
– Ann Landers
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
– Bill Vaughan
“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.”
– Francis Bacon
“You can count how many seeds there are in an apple .. but you cannot count how many apples there are in a seed”.
– Unknown
“Darkening nights are drawing in Log fires are lit, the curtains close Gardens wait for the year to begin Inside gardeners warm their toes.”
– By David Squire
“Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.”
– Unknown
“If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.”
– Cicero
“If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it away from him. An investment of knowledge always pays the best interest.”
– Benjamin Franklin
All clays are pretty well unworkable with ordinary implements.
For the melted toffee consistency of winter, you might prefer a large soup-ladle; for light working over summer, a hammer and cold chisel.
Is the soil always too wet or too dry?
No, there’s a period – usually a day or two in May
– when you can actually use a fork.
– John Lucas, Backs to the Garden Wall
“Trouble Springs From Idleness.”
– Benjamin Franklin
Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.
– Thomas Edison
“He who has a why can endure any how.”
– Friedrich Neitzsche
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
– Robert Frost
More Gardening Quotes
Gardening Notes and Quotes," Exley Gift Books – Spiral hardback, 96 pages, (October 1997), Page after page of gorgeous photos, prints of famous paintings and quotes from famous fellow gardeners. A great gift for any gardener or the 35 blank, or near blank pages it can be used as your own gardening or personal journal.
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