The giant oak is an acorn that held its ground.
— author unknown

Begin early. But it's never too late to start.
—Emilie Barnes

Grow what you love. The love will keep it growing.
—Emilie Barnes

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

What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty.
—Henry Ward Beecher

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

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
—William Blake (1793)

A gardener learns more in the mistakes than in the successes.
—Barbara Dodge Borland

Autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
—Elizabeth Bowen

There are several ways to lay out a little garden; the best way is to get a gardener.
—Karel Capek

A garden is the interface between the house and the rest of civilization.
—Geoffrey Charlesworth

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?
—G. K. Chesterton

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

I must ally myself with my soil; study and help it to the utmost, untiringly... Always, the soil must come first.
—Marion Cran

What a pother have authors made with Roses! What a racket have they kept!
—Nicholas Culpeper (1653)

When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and culture are established.
—Andrew Jackson Downing

My garden is an honest place. Every tree and every vine are incapable of concealment, and tell after two or three months exactly what sort of treatment they have had.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

And I beseech you, forget not to informe yourselfe as dilligently as may be, in things that belong to gardening.
—John Evelyn (1706)

The rules of garden are the rules of art; the rules of the rock-garden are the more and awful rules of Nature herself.
—Reginald Farrer

But each spring...a gardening instinct, sore as the sap rising in the trees, stirs within us. We look about and decide to tame another little bit of ground.
—Lewis Gannett

Bees are very fond of Horehound nectar, and the honey they make from the flowers where they are abundant has a high reputation, and used to be almost as popular as Horehound candy.
—Maud Grieve (Culinary Herbs & Condiments, 1934)

When Wordsworth's heart with pleasure filled at a crowd of golden daffodils, it's a safe bet he didn't see them two weeks later.
—Geoff Hamilton

Gardening seems an easy art, for infinitude is almost as well suggested in a small plot as a large one.
—Robert Harbison

Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge.
—George Herbert (1640)

Nature soon takes over if the gardener is absent.
—Penelope Hobhouse

Nothing is a better lesson in the knowledge of plants than to sit down in front of them and look them over just as carefully as possible; and in no way can such study be more pleasantly or conveniently carried on than by taking a light seat to the rock-wall and giving plenty of time to each kind of little plant, examining it closely and asking oneself, and it, why this and why that?
—Gertrude Jekyll

There is nothing like pruning a grapevine for training oneself to think like a plant.
—Hugh Johnson

Fathers, instill in your children the garden-mania.
—Charles Joseph (Prince de Ligne, 1781)

I suppose that for most people one of the darker joys of gardening is that once you've got started it's not at all hard to find someone who knows a little bit less than you.
—Allen Lacy

A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.
—Charles Lamb (1830)

Gardening, reading about gardening, and writing about gardening are all one; no one can garden alone.
—Elizabeth Lawrence

A garden should always look bigger than it really is.
—Alexander le Blond (1712)

Good gardening and a quiet life seldom go hand in hand.
—Christopher Lloyd

A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak.
—James Russell Lowell

The area of a handsome Garden may take up thirty or forty Acres, not more.
—Philip Miller (1724)

Nature does not hesitate to interfere with me. So I do not hesitate to tamper with it.
—Henry Mitchell

Men are like plants—they never grow happily unless they are well cultivated.
—Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1721)

My gardening will never make me famous.
I'm a horticultural ignoramus,
I can't tell a string bean from a soy bean,
or even a girl bean from a boy bean.
—Ogden Nash

We sit in other people's gardens, why not in our own?
—Mirabel Osler

"Green fingers" are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and love growing things.
—Russell Page (The Education of a Gardener)

Flowers...are richness enough in the garden picture. To add further ornamentation is to distract.
—Russell Page

When we save seeds, we are taking history into our own hands. Literally, holding a seed is holding a story that stretches back, sometimes centuries. It's a story that conjures up over-the-fence seed swaps. It's a story that speaks to beating the odds, to adaptation and evolution, to finding a niche and holding on tight, just the way a bean tendril does. Seeds also speak of the future, of those untold, unfolded stories, the ones that you and I are shaping this very moment.
—Rebecca Pastor

A little studied negligence is becoming to a garden.
—Eleanor Perenyi

Nature abhors a garden.
—Michael Pollan

...a garden is like the self. It has so many layers and winding paths, real or imagined, that it can never be known, completely, even by the most intimate of friends.
—Anne Raver (American garden writer)

Don't wear perfume in the garden—unless you want to be pollinated by bees.
—Anne Raver

I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.
—Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

One day, the gardener realizes that what she is doing out there is actually teaching herself to garden by performing a series of experiments. This is a pivotal moment.
—Margaret Roach

The very statement that there is but one way to make a garden is its own refutation.
—William Robinson

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

Flowers really do intoxicate me.
—Vita Sackville-West

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing better than they have ever done before.
—Vita Sackville-West

The true gardener must be brutal, and imaginative for the future.
—Vita Sackville-West

Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything—except itself.
—May Sarton

It is unchristian to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.
—Frank J. Scott (1870)

Nothing is more completely the child of Art than a Garden.
—Sir Walter Scott

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
—George Bernard Shaw

My garden, with its silence and pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.
—Alexander Smith

When one of my plants dies, I die a little inside, too.
—Linda Solegato

Gardening is civil and social, but wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
—Henry David Thoreau (1862)

Plants in pots are like animals in a zoo—they're totally dependent on their keepers.
—John Van de Water

The man around the corner keeps experimenting with new flowers every year, and now has quite an extensive list of things he can't grow.
—William Vaughn

I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden—name things as I find them.
—Charles Dudley Warner (1871)