Quotes About Gardening

In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.

When I pass a flowering zucchini plant in a garden, my heart skips a beat.

My parents had a gardener when I was growing up, and he and I would dig in the dirt together - my mom and dad were definitely not digging with me! When I was 5, he helped me plant some corn in our backyard, and I remember how fascinating it was to watch it grow. Little did I know that 50 years later I'd be growing corn in a different way.

To be able to buy a plant and plant it, that's a luxury to me.

Think realistically with what you're going to eat - don't plant 200 radishes!

Don't plant too deeply. Pay attention to the directions on the seed packets as far as how deep and how close together to plant the seeds.

When these suckers had formed roots in the open ground, or kind of nursery where they were planted, they were looked over and the best taken up for potting.

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

I think I just want to garden - or kill some plants, in my case.

I'm good with furniture, very bad with plants.

I have a living wall of 30 plants - tarragon, rosemary, echinacea. I like to walk alongside it, plucking and chewing.

I compost at home. I'm always taking old banana peels, eggshells, coffee beans, or whatever it is, and putting them in a compost bin and then using it in my backyard.

When I have to do something fast, I wear the most unflattering rubber pants over my pants and a big easy sweater. I can get on my knees in the garden in whatever condition, and when I'm done, I can take it off, get in the car, and drive to the office. It's the most practical thing.

My gardening apprenticeship was similar to the way a chimney sweep is pushed up a chimney. It was enforced by my parents, non-negotiable - it would be weeding the strawberries, mowing the grass.

Mostly, I spend my time being a mother to my two children, working in my organic garden, raising masses of sweet peas, being passionately involved in conservation, recycling and solar energy.

My perfect day is to work incredibly well in the morning and write something wonderful, then take the dog for a walk and go for a swim in the ladies' ponds on Hampstead Heath or work in my allotment. Then I get tarted up in the evening and go out in London to dinner or the cinema.

On a Friday night, I switch on my log burner, stick on 'Gardeners' World' and I am so happy.

I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit.

If he does it right and is lucky, in nine or 10 months he scoops the tiny half-inch seedlings out of the bottle and plants them in community pots. A year later he transplants them to individual three-inch pots and in another two years to 4 1/2-inch pots, and crosses his fingers. Then, five or six or seven years since the day he put pollen to stigma, he sees an orchid no one ever saw before. It is different from any orchid that has ever bloomed, including those in the Garden of Eden.

Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they've planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But humans hear nothing.

Evelyn did more than complain. He also looked for ways to clear the air. He accepted appointment as one of London's commissioners of sewers. And since he was interested in gardening and in trees, his inventive mind turned to moving industry out of London and perfuming the city's precincts with flowering plants—reversing, as it were, at least locally, the transition from wood to coal. King Charles II had been restored to the throne on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660

Once the danger of frost had passed she could plant her herb garden: creeping thyme, dill, sweet basil, hyssop, French tarragon, and bronze fennel. All wonderful flavors and scents added to her dishes.

He had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.

Pray for miracles, but plant cabbages.