Quotes About Gardening

by This Organic Life, a compelling book by Joan Dye Gussow that tells how, and more important why, she aspired

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds." —Dag Hammarskjöld

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.

Finding missing mittens is hard work. It would be easier to grow new ones! Let's try planting the other mitten right here in the garden. Next spring when the snow melts, a little mitten tree might sprout. Miss Seltzer and I would take good care of it all summer long. In the fall we'd pick the ripe mittens. Then I'd give mittens on Christmas. And mittens on birthdays. And mittens on Valentine's Day!

If you want to be happy for a short time, get drunk happy for a long time, fall in love; happy forever, take up gardening.

My hobby is gardening, I love it, it's my main hobby. I like being at home and I'm very happy being in my house, I love cooking.

We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.

I love root vegetables: carrots, parsnips, and turnips.

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

Wahrhaftig, in solchen Zeiten wie diesen sind die Gärtner die einzigen, die echten Künstler.

Last summer the plant was larger than ever. The vines ranged up to the roof on a trellis I had made. I anticipated more roses than ever. But I was disappointed. The blossoms were small and scrawny.

I begin my days by practicing piano, which I do badly but with ardor. Then I read for a while. I write until I'm too hungry to keep writing and then after lunch I spend some time in my garden before writing again. I want to also study French, but I rarely do. As I meander my way through one of these days, it occurs to me that my work life resembles the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat.

There is a direct correlation between gardening and mental health, not just to maintain good mental health but to repair it as well - that's anything in the gamut from depression to serious brain damage, schizophrenia or autism.

A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful writer to settle down, build his dream house, and maybe do some gardening.

Absorbing a healthy amount of dirt builds your immune system.

No one supposes, when he sees a forester pruning a copse to help the trees to grow, or a gardener hunting for snails, tending young plants under glass frames, or exposing them to the health-giving heat of a conservatory, that these things are done from a feeling of affection for the vegetable kingdom. And yet care for it he does, much more so than cold reason would suppose. This affection, however, is not the motivating reason for his pains; it is rather their necessary accompaniment.

My little bit of earth in the front garden is one of the places that I find my bearings. The rhythm of my day begins with a cup of coffee and a little bit of weeding or dreaming.

That plant needs a diaper,

He was succeeded by a gentleman who gazed at the Brussels sprouts and asked if the funny little knobs on the stalks were a form of disease. I told him yes. Eczema.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

I used to dig in the garden, and there isn't anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass... unless you are a SF writer, in which case, pretty soon you're viewing crabgrass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place? The question I always found myself asking was, 'What is it, really?'

Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature.

It is a greater act of faith to plant a bulb than to plant a tree.