Favorite gardening quotes

Here are my favorite quotes on gardening and together they sum up my garden philosophy pretty well (I like to think I belong with such illustrious company).

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. George Cadbury

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.   Orson Scott Card

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.  D Elton Trueblood

I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation. Phyllis Theroux 

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

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

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.  Voltaire 

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.   Mirabel Osler

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.   Nathaniel Hawthorne

I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden.   Abraham Cowley  1666

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.   Ralph Waldo Emerson

The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.   John Ruskin

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. Mohandas Gandhi

Gardening is the purest of human pleasures.  Francis Bacon

A house though otherwise beautiful, yet if it hath no Garden belonging to it, is more like a Prison than a House.    William Coles

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.   Michel de Montaigne

A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.  Henri Frederic Amiel

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God.   Thomas Jefferson

The garden that is finished is dead.  H. E. Bates

Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity. John Evelyn, 1666

For most of us who are intimidated by theories of garden design, the cottage garden provides immediate appeal, since it is a horticultural rather than an architectural solution to a limited area.   Patricia Thorpe

We come from the earth, We return to the earth, And in between we garden.   Author Unknown

The more help a man has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.   William M. Davies

The most serious gardening I do would seem very strange to an onlooker, for it involves hours of walking round in circles, apparently doing nothing.   Helen Dillon

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature. Zeno 335BC

And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden . . . You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.   Rudyard Kipling

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.   Albert Einstein

If you would be happy your whole life long, Become a gardener.   Old Chinese Proverb

A garden is not made in a year; indeed it is never made in the sense of finality. It grows, and with the labour of love should go on growing.   Frederick Eden

There is no such thing as an ugly garden-gardens, like babies, are all beautiful to their parents.   Ken Druse

Advice on dandelions: If you can't beat them, eat them.   Dr James Duke

In his garden every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation.   Louise Beebe Wilder

It used to be thought that our love of plants was an impractical but pure passion. But now, in the age of environmental crisis, we're discovering that gardening is essential to human life.   Jacqueline Heriteau

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.   Wendell Berry

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.   Frances Hodgson Burnett

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.  Paul Cezanne