Enjoy these quotes read by Michelanne Jerome. A new quote added each week.
Jim Peterson
Garden Life by Garden Design
Pictured: Claude Monet's Garden at Giverny
Photo by Jim Peterson
"Some kids have never seen what a real tomato looks like off the vine. They don't know where a cucumber comes from. And that really affects the way they view food. So a garden helps them really get their hands dirty, literally, and understand the whole process of where their food comes from." —Michelle Obama
"I like gardening—it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself." —Alice Sebold
"Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible." —Anne Wareham
“A garden that is designed to only look pretty barely skims the surface of what landscapes can offer.” —Toby Hemenway
"Horticultural passions are peculiar things. A mild interest in that plant or another can suddenly flame into something more nearly describable as an obsession." —Allen Lacy
"As long as one has a garden, one has a future; and as long as one has a future, one is alive." —Frances Hodgson Burnett
"As thinking, feeling beings, we have an untapped potential to relate to the plant world." —Judith Handelsman
"I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow." —David Hobson
"Painting is closely related to gardening but closer still is poetry.” —Robert Dash
"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." —May Sarton
"No single sort of garden suits everyone. Shut your eyes and dream of the garden you’d most love, then open your eyes and start planting. Loved gardens flourish, boring ones are hard work.” —Jackie French
"I always think of my sins when I weed. They grow apace in the same way, and are harder still to get rid of." —Helen Rutherford Ely
"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food, and medicine for the soul.” —Luther Burbank
"Gardening has taught me the lesson of beginnings and endings, and of cycles and of renewal. It isn’t about the plants. It’s about the things that have happened in the garden." —Lolita Aaron
"The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul." —Alfred Austin
"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better." —Albert Einstein
"The great thing is not to be timid in your gardening, whether it's colors, shapes, juxtapositions, or the contents themselves. Splash around and enjoy yourself." —Christopher Lloyd
"You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful." —Monty Don
"A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all, it teaches entire trust.” —Gertrude Jekyll
"The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.” —Michael Pollan
"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
"A natural garden calls for paths, whether hard or soft, to allow the user to wander and make discoveries, so that all is not revealed at first glance." —John Brookes
"Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common." —Michael Pollan
"The view from your bedroom window should include something that blooms every spring." —Michelle Slatalla
"Gardens aren't installations, they don't need to be attractive as soon as they are completed: gardens can grow and, like all newborn creatures, they should have that rare and special privilege of being awkward and graceless." —Paolo Pejrone
"I try for beauty and harmony everywhere, and especially for harmony of color.” —Gertrude Jekyll
"'More, more, more' is my gardening motto. If growing a single kind of daylily is one of life's good things, then growing thirty, forty, or even a hundred of them is one of life's even better things." —Allen Lacy
"Embracing Spring as she awakens from a much-deserved winter's rest is such a tonic. Spring is by far my favorite season of the year, with the days starting to get both longer and warmer, being able to work in the garden again where I can be at one with Nature and all her glory, while preparing the garden to ensure maximum success in the summer months! I love watching as buds swell and unfurl on stems and branches, the myriads of daffodils filling the garden beds with yellow and white, and as the succession of spring flowers take their turn to bloom, the perfume of spring fills the air and makes me glad to be alive!" —Judi Garst
"In setting a garden, we are painting—a picture of hundreds of feet or yards, instead of so many inches, painted with living flowers and seen by open daylight—so that to paint it rightly is a debt that we owe to the beauty of flowers and to the light of the sun." —William Robinson
"When your garden is finished I hope it will be more beautiful than you had anticipated, require less care than you expected, and have cost only a little more than you had planned." —Thomas Church
"I shall never have the garden I have in my mind, but that for me is the joy of it; certain things can never be realized and so all the more reason to attempt them." —Jamaica Kincaid
"Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel." —Aldo Leopold
"The scent of warm soil...is deep, rich, and sexy. It's primal. It's earthy. It makes you want to get down on hands and knees, gather a fistful, and inhale." —Tovah Martin
