I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit. ~Reginald Farrer, In a Yorkshire Garden, 1909

"Do the best that you can in the place where you are, and be kind." -- Scott Nearing

"Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay." -- George Meredith

"Nature abhors a garden." Michael Pollan

"My whole life had been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God's presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that lets you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first compost heap."Bette Midler

We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all. -Dorothy Day

Who has learned to garden who did not at the same time learn to be patient? -HLV Fletcher 1949

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden. -Sir Walter Scott 1828

Nothing is as interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. - Robert Louis Stevenson, 1890

[I]t occurred to me that agriculture considered as a medium does appear to have an "outside" - that is, gardening. It's true that gardening is not the revolution, nor does gardening turn every gardener into a cultural radical. True, but perhaps in the long run less interesting than the fact that gardening remains prior to and outside agriculture, and the persistence of the garden represents some kind of dialectical negativity in relation to agriculture. [. . . ]But gardening is not just critique. It has a positive side. It actually produces good food and other benefits that exist outside the complex of exchange, or at least somewhat outside. That is, gardening is "praxis". Moreover, it is an art form, an area of creativity as rich and promising as any symbolic activity, and one which can roughly but easily transpire beyond the realm of representation and mediation. It can function as an important part of "every day life" in the radical sense of that term. In short, it occurred to me that perhaps the only possible avant garde is the avant garden. - Peter Lamborn Wilson in Avant Gardening, 1999 Autonomedia

A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction.-Ralph Waldo Emerson 1860

There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.- John Ruskin 1851

{My Garden} is a confusion of kitchen and parterre, orchard and flower garden, which lie so mixt and interwoven with one another, that if a foreigner, who had seen nothing of our country, should be conveyed into my garden at his first landing, he would look upon it as a natural wilderness, and one of the uncultivated parts of our country. (I lost the name of the author of this quote, if you know, please drop me an email)

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. - Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me. - Thomas Jefferson, 1790

{My garden}, that skirted the avenue of the Manse, was of precisely the right extent. An hour or two of morning labor was all that it required. But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times of 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. - Nathaniel Hawthorne 1846

" This is June, the month of grass and leaves . . . already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomena is reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. " - Henry David Thoreau, June 6, 1857

"I want death to find me planting my cabbages"Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

"There are those who lack respect for the natural world; awful things will happen to them. Therefore respect where you dwell. " - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

"Gardening, like sex and food, lies somewhere between art and nature, being wholly neither but partly both." - Roger Grounds

Updated 3/02/02