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.

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

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.

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.

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 want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

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

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

The cottage garden; most for use designed, Yet not of beauty destitute.

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

Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.

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

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

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

Gardening is not a rational act.

A good garden may have some weeds.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

All gardening is landscape painting.

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

I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards.

Against her ankles as she trod The lucky buttercups did nod.

Flowers are happy things.

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

There is nothing I like better at the end of a hot summer's day than taking a short walk around the garden. You can smell the heat coming up from the earth to meet the cooler night air.

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.

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.

It's true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else.

The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.

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

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

Gardening is how I relax. It's another form of creating and playing with colors.

The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.

I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.

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

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.

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!

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

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

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.

Garden as though you will live forever.

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

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.

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

He plants trees to benefit another generation.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

Well tended garden is better than a neglected wood lot.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.

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

Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade.

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.

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

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

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

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

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

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

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

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

Use plants to bring life.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

To dwell is to 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.

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

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

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

Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden.

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.

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

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

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