Gardening Quotes

“Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.”

Charles Dudley Warner

“He who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth is generally considered a fortunate person, but his good fortune is small compared to that of the happy mortal who enters this world with a passion for flowers in his soul.”

Celia Thaxter

“The first purpose of a garden is to give happiness and repose of mind.”

Gertrude Jekyll

“The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house.”

Elizabeth von Arnim

“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.”

Liberty Hyde Bailey

“The breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air, where it comes and goes like the warbling of music, than in the hand.”

Francis Bacon

“What wondrous life is this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head.”

Andrew Marvell

“Sweet April showers do spring May flowers.”

Thomas Tusser

“All gardening is landscape painting.”

Alexander Pope

“When all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils; beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”

William Wordsworth

“A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, and the young winds fed it with silver dew.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The Amen of nature is always a flower.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“Spake full well, in language quaint and olden, one who dwelleth by the castled Rhine, when he called the flowers, so blue and golden, stars, that in earth's firmament do shine.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Fair Daffodils, we weep to see you haste away so soon.”

Robert Herrick

“O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm that flies in the night, in the howling storm, has found out thy bed of crimson joy.”

William Blake

“Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy.”

Christina Rossetti

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring - when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed.”

Henry David Thoreau

“'Might I,' quavered Mary, 'might I have a bit of earth?'”

Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things.”

Virgil

“There was a man of Sung, who was grieved that his growing corn was not longer, and so he pulled it up.”

Mencius

“I will go root away the noisome weeds, which without profit suck the soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.”

William Shakespeare

“The fairest flowers o' the season are our carnations and streak'd gillyvors.”

William Shakespeare

“Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart, unpruned dies.”

William Shakespeare

“The forward violet thus did I chide: Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, if not from my love's breath?”

William Shakespeare