Garden Quotations

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

Stop watering things that were never meant to grow in your life. Water what works, what's good, what's right. Stop playing around with those dead bones and stuff you can't fix, its over...leave it alone! You're coming into a season of greatness. If you water what's alive and divine, you will see harvest like you've never seen before. Stop wasting water on dead issues, dead relationships, dead people, a dead past. No matter how much you water concrete, you can't grow a garden.

I've always felt that having a garden is like having a good and loyal friend.

It's fun to think about plants not just as decorations but as functioning parts of our yard's ecosystem that attract wildlife to the garden. We have hummingbirds, tons of bees, and many monarch butterflies. The kids love it! Though we're very laissez-faire with the garden and never put chemicals on it or even water it much!

I enjoy painting, cutting the lawn and working in the garden when I have time. That's therapy for me. I enjoy working with my hands.

The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives.

Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle.

But if each man could have his own house, a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings - then, I thought, there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life

Milan, for me, is a city of discovery. You can find some amazing gardens behind some great houses; I also love finding beautiful galleries and incredible shops, but you have to explore. And the food is amazing.

I'm in this absolutely gorgeous manor house with acres of quite beautiful countryside. I've got trout in the river, an organic vegetable garden, I've got my work 40 yards from my home. I don't mind being criticised, but where are they criticising from? Which hut are they criticising me from, exactly?

How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show, and be good for nothing.

I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don't like to get my knees dirty. I don't have a garden.

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.

I had a ton of animals; I had a goat growing up, a bunch of rabbits, a vegetable garden.

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.

I live in, literally, the same home when I was swiping my first bank card and wondering if I'd have to put back the Charmin. We still don't have a dishwasher. My mom has done all these gardens so now my house looks like the garden shack in the middle of Versailles.

Daddy had a farm - cows, pigs, OK, a big garden, OK? We did live off the land, and then we would supplement all that with whatever we could kill or catch. Whether we'd kill squirrels, deer, duck, or caught catfish or brim, that was what went on the table.

Be your own politics, grow your own garden, and maybe you can help out more.

I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It's in Vermont. I don't think I'd be very good at Weed Dating.

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in the garden.

I walk my dogs. I garden a little. I play a bit of tennis. Basically when I have spare time I'm making music.

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.

I like to go for a walk or swimming or in the garden when I can. It's a busy kind of life, but I guess I'm lucky.

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.

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.

One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?

I love being in my garden. I don't plant a lot of exotic flora, but I do spend a lot of time outside doing manual labour.

While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.

The most lasting and pure gladness comes to me from my gardens.

People's backyards are much more interesting than their front gardens, and houses that back on to railways are public benefactors.

Yet the wonder of it all is that, while engaged in a seemingly endless struggle, the Israelis have managed to turn a desert into a garden.

My neighbour asked if he could use my lawnmower and I told him of course he could, so long as he didn't take it out of my garden.

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

President Obama has expressed his commitment to responsible stewardship of our land, water, and other natural resources. And one way of restoring the land to its natural condition is what we are doing here today - breaking pavement for the People's Garden.

Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart.

Everyone can identify with a fragrant garden, with beauty of sunset, with the quiet of nature, with a warm and cozy cottage.

A garden is to be a world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling as well as the sunny ones.

It's my destiny to make a place where people can come and be happy: a garden of joy.

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

I don't want to see people decorating a house or digging a garden. As for guys like Jonathan Ross, he got an award there last Christmas. What for? He doesn't sing, dance or tell jokes, does he?

As a female pilot, the sacred rose garden in my heart is the motherland's blue sky.

And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.

I did a salad, but I didn't do a garden.

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.

My family lived off the land and summer evening meals featured baked stuffed tomatoes, potato salad, corn on the cob, fresh shelled peas and homemade ice cream with strawberries from our garden. With no air conditioning in those days, the cool porch was the center of our universe after the scorching days.

I also like to garden. I grow things, vegetables, flowers... I particularly like orchids. I raise orchids.

The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I'm always at home - yea, I'm always at Om.

Granny beads are what they're called when a grandma works the garden all day - you always see them - they have a handkerchief around their neck with a lot of dust on them, and then the sweat will go down and make these black beads of sweat and dirt around their neck. And that's what they call granny beads.

Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.

I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

I went to see President Nixon at the White House. It wasn't difficult to get a meeting because I was heavyweight champion of the world. So I came to Washington and walked around the garden with Nixon, his wife and daughter. I said: I want you to give Ali his licence back. I want to beat him up for you.

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.

A garden must combine the poetic and he mysterious with a feeling of serenity and joy

Everyone wants instant everything, and they want instant success, but I always think you should treat things in the arts like a garden, and let them grow.

Someone had told me about a house in Wandsworth, southwest London - 21 Blenkarne Road - with an incredible garden, so I went and had a look. I walked in and just said, 'I want it.'

Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden!

I call myself, 'The Estee Lauder of the garden world.' I'm my own little conglomerate.

The first painting that I realised I liked was 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch, when I was six years old, at the Prado in Madrid. I still find myself returning there every time I'm in the city.

What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.

There's great value to knitting or digging up your garden or chopping up vegetables for soup, because you're taking some time away from turning the pages, answering your emails, talking to people on the phone, and you're letting your brain process whatever is stuck up in there.

Many of my favourite hotels are in London. I like the Covent Garden Hotel and I stayed at Blakes last time I was in London. I like the feeling of warmth and homeliness that you get from both of those places.

My favourite plant is the foxglove. I think they are a perfect balance between being a garden plant and a wild plant, as at home in woodland as they are in a city.

I sometimes think the chef end of cooking is not the real end of cooking. Cooking is all about homes and gardens, it doesn't happen in restaurants

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

There is a lovable quality about the actual tools. One feels so kindly to the thing that enables the hand to obey the brain. Moreover, one feels a good deal of respect for it; without it the brain and the hand would be helpless.

George Harrison is perhaps one of the most creative people I ever met, not only in his music and songwriting, but just the way he lived his life, decorated his gardens and homes. He was a dear friend of mine. His entire approach to music was very unique.

They say that gardens look better when they are created by loving gardeners rather than by landscapers, because the garden is more tended to and cared for. The same thing goes for cooking. I only cook for people I love.

Marriage is almost as old as dirt, and it was defined in the garden between Adam and Eve. One man, one woman for life till death do you part. So I would never attempt to try to redefine marriage. And I don't think anyone else should either. So do I support the idea of gay marriage? No, I don't.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, 'The good outnumber you, and we always will.'

It will not always be summer: build barns.

They can certainly expect to be very impressed with the technical aspects of the show, fooled and led up the garden path by the story and ultimately have a jolly good laugh!

I have always wanted to be a gardener, and I love the time I spend in my garden.

The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.

But I believe that there are marriages where you can have your pool table and she can have her scrapbooking room or garden or whatever it is. But when everyone has what they want, it's not funny. There's no conflict.

Through consciousness, our minds have the power to change our planet and ourselves. It is time we heed the wisdom of the ancient indigenous people and channel our consciousness and spirit to tend the garden and not destroy it.

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.

In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.

My work begun to spread out. And calls to the universities begun to take me out of my garden, you know.

I don't take myself seriously any more. Sometimes I just garden in my knickers and platform shoes.

I cannot live without flowers everywhere. I grew up having a big garden, the size of a city block, in Rombas.

I like solitary pursuits, such as reading or pottering about in the garden.

A beginner must look on himself as one setting out to make a garden for his Lord's pleasure, on most unfruitful soil which abounds in weeds. His Majesty roots up the weeds and will put in good plants instead. Let us reckon that this is already done when the soul decides to practice prayer and has begun to do so.

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

A creative person has to create. It doesn't really matter what you create. If such a dancer wanted to go out and build the cactus gardens where he could, in Mexico, let him do that, but something that is creative has to go on.

My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.

I like Toronto a lot, it's a good city. The only thing that really annoys me about Toronto is that you're turning Maple Leaf Gardens into a grocery store, which is absolutely nothing short of disgusting.

I have become a prisoner of the peace movement. But you can't say that the termination is coming and then say that you are going back to your own garden to dig.

You rarely get satisfaction sitting in an easy chair. If you work in a garden on the other hand, and it yields beautiful tomatoes, that's a good feeling.

Give the children an opportunity to make garden. Let them grow what they will. It matters less that they grow good plants than that they try for themselves.

Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions.

I'm never happy with what I've written. You imagine, before you start, there's a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it's a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.