Top 130 Gardening Quotes

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.

Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.

A good garden may have some weeds.

No one will understand a Japanese garden until you’ve walked through one, and you hear the crunch underfoot, and you smell it, and you experience it over time. Now there’s no photograph or any movie that can give you that experience.

Rock ‘n’ Roll, no roses or gardening.

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

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

Fertilizer does no good in a heap, but a little spread around works miracles all over.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

From my earliest memories, I loved the farm. My grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine and had a huge, well kept garden with an octagonal chicken house in the corner.

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.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

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

A weed is but an unloved flower.

Gardening and my culinary skills keep me busy.

Gardening gloves are for sissies. I always have dirt under my nails.

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

Without doubt, without hesitation, I choose gardening over the gym. I can’t stand going to the gym. It doesn’t appeal to me at all. Give me gardening every time.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise. That is easy to see and evaluate. It inculcates high levels of well-being. That is undeniable and needs little measurement.

If a person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.

One marked feature of the people, both high and low, is a love for flowers.

I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens. I can not bear gardening, but I love gardens.

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

I think we put far too much interest in trying to get ten to 20 year olds interested in gardening. I think you should do everything you can to try and get them interested up to the age of 10.

Many talk about a guest worker program. I think most reasonable people believe that a guest worker program in the farming industry, perhaps in the gardening and landscape industries, is reasonable.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

If I’m in the country, my big idea is to do nothing. It means talking, it means cooking with the leftovers in the fridge – l’art d’accommoder les restes – it means gardening.

As an athlete, if you train your body but don’t fuel it the right way, that doesn’t make much sense. Adopting a plant-based diet with the right amount of proteins that came from the right places was the way to go. I also just love gardening.

I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.

I am a particular fan of integrative exercise – that is, exercise that occurs in the course of doing some productive activity such as gardening, bicycling to work, doing home improvement projects and so on.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.

I do the gardening.

If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren’t really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

I grew up at my grandmother’s house, and she had a beautiful garden. I used to hate mowing the lawn and weeding, which is what you do when you’re a kid. I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens.

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

Garden as though you will live forever.

Cooking and gardening involve so many disciplines: math, chemistry, reading, history.

I love Michel Roux, Jr., and James Martin – the chefs who are experts in their own right, like Rick Stein on fish. But I don’t watch them very much because I don’t think it’s fair for my husband to be in a total food environment all the time! So we watch programmes about gardening more.

I spend as much time as I can in my garden, and if I’m not writing songs or gardening, I’m painting.

Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path.

I am so longing to be domestic,, cooking stew, gardening, hopefully having some children, painting, sitting still in one place.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Gardening is not a rational act.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

I’m really into gardening.

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

All gardening is landscape painting.

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

There were points when I’ve thought about getting into landscape gardening or getting back to illustrating, but mostly with a bit of a chip on my shoulder.

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.

I’m not a gardener. I don’t have the consistency for gardening, and I have barely enough for an orchard. I don’t embarrass myself. You have to be there tending and weeding. With orchards, you can go through negligent periods and recover.

I got a little house in East L.A. and did the gardening. I was doing some acting here and there, doing my own thing… getting back to reality.

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

I find I am growing fonder of gardening, listening to music and reading.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

I just planted the family vegetables yesterday. You name it, I grow it.

There is some risk to increase birth defects if you do a lot of outdoor gardening when you are pregnant. That can increase rates of toxoplasmosis.

I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

I like the physical activity of gardening. It’s kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding.

Use plants to bring life.

When I’m outside gardening, it can be so inspiring. I think of words and melodies. It’s peaceful. Every singer-songwriter should find something outside of music that makes them as happy as gardening makes me.

I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in both gardening and painting. I must have been born with a trowel in one hand and a paintbrush in the other.

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France – that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

From plants that wake when others sleep, from timid jasmine buds that keep their odour to themselves all day, but when the sunlight dies away let the delicious secret out to every breeze that roams about.

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

In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall – that when the play is finished, it’s done – but now I realise it’s more like gardening; you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You’re part of a thing that’s living.

I need my friends, I need my house, I need my garden.

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.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.

Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.

The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.

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.

I’d love to take up organic vegetable gardening, do anything that involves learning.

I’ve always loved the woods, and I’ve always loved gardening and a lot of solitude and quiet.

Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama.

Clarity is the most important thing. I can compare clarity to pruning in gardening. You know, you need to be clear. If you are not clear, nothing is going to happen. You have to be clear. Then you have to be confident about your vision. And after that, you just have to put a lot of work in.

I like gardening.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

I think in the same way when I’m cooking, when I’m gardening, when I’m choosing fabrics. It’s a way of living.

I keep myself busy, I read a lot, watch a lot of TV, and do a lot of gardening. I do stupid stuff and I love it.

If you build up the soil with organic material, the plants will do just fine.

I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and grow heirloom tomatoes, and I do have that dream. It would be lovely. I do love gardening and all of that, but I do love my work.

I find myself listening to Talk Talk on repeat while I’m doing gardening in upstate New York. Their music is so languid, and I just love his voice.

Well tended garden is better than a neglected wood lot.

I love a lot of things, and I’m pretty much obsessive about most things I do, whether it be gardening, or architecture, or music. I’d be an obsessive hairdresser.

Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love!

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.

You have to get up and plant the seed and see if it grows, but you can’t just wait around, you have to water it and take care of it.

Because I am really interested in gardening, I do really interesting plants, not even always flowers. And because I have grown them, I really know them like friends. I paint everything from exotic orchids to rosehips growing wild in a hedge. They just have to speak to me.

It’s my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they’ve got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very minor role.

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

I love gardening, and I love cooking. I love things like that. I love creating things.

It is a good idea to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.

I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.

Perhaps the CDC should quit spending money on things like jazzercise, urban gardening, and massage therapy and direct that money to where it’s appropriate in protecting the health of the American people.

My partner loves gardening and beekeeping and chickens and all that stuff.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

I love decorating my home. I’m a gardener too, so that’s usually something I have to play catch up with.

My parents were/are straight-edge hippies. Mom roamed around gardening so we would have fresh food, and Dad was on wood-chopping duty to heat our passive solar home that they figured out how to design and build together. I was the kid with green peppers in my lunch, and I liked them!

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.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

The Herbs ought to be distilled when they are in their greatest vigor, and so ought the Flowers also.

I adore gardening and plan to take it up properly when I have a bit more time on my hands. Until then, I love pottering in garden centres. I’m totally low maintenance. I don’t ask for fancy plants, just basic, long-lasting shrubs that look nice. But I am particular about flowers.

As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

A brier rose whose buds yield fragrant harvest for the honey bee.

I don’t see my artist friends as any more neurotic or addiction-prone than the others. The roommates I have had who were into triathlons or environmentalism were just as crazy as the poets, just as prone to tears over gardening or air conditioners, just as ready to kite a cheque or binge on cookie dough.

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?

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, ‘You know, that doesn’t look right’.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

My extravagance is my garden – it’s the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.

Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they’re tender. They have to be persistent.

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

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

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Living in New York after 14 years, I’m such an outdoors kind of person. I love gardening and building things. I like restoring old furniture.

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.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.

I came to London. I spent nine months doing domestic work and gardening because I knew I wanted to get a West End show. So, when I was offered jobs in Stoke or Leicester or whatever, I’d say no. Eventually, I got ‘Godspell.’ It was gently building.

You have to put your partner and family at the top of the list and there must be downtime – time for gardening, cooking time, book reading time.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

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 profession I have keeps dragging me into drama and taking me away from baking, flowering and gardening.