On Gardening in General "The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies." - Gertrude Jekyll "To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves." - Mahatma Gandhi "Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration." - Lou Erickson "What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it." - Charles Dudley Warner "Nothing is more the child of art than a garden." - Sir Walter Scott "It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves." - Robert Louis Stevenson "A garden is a symbol of man's arrogance, perverting nature to human ends ..." - Tim Smit, The Lost Gardens of Heligan "There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals." - John Ruskin, 1851 "Who has learned to garden who did not at the same time learn to be patient?" - H.L.V. Fletcher, 1949 "beauty is a by-product, .... The main business of gardens is sex and death" - Sam Llewellyn, The Sea Garden "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God ." - Thomas Jefferson "No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden." - Thomas Jefferson "Though an old man, I am but a young gardener." - Thomas Jefferson "How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence." - Benjamin Disraeli "Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration." - Lou Erickson "What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it." - Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden, 1871 "We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses." - Abraham Lincoln "The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world." - 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 something better than they have ever done before." - Vita Sackville-West, 1892 - 1962 "There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments." - Janet Kilburn Phillips "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." - William Shakespeare "Gardening is the purest of human pleasures." - Francis Bacon "I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers." - Claude Monet "A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself." - May Sarton "A garden is never so good as it will be next year" - Thomas Cooper "The garden that is finished is dead." - H. E. Bates "Gardens... should be like lovely, well-shaped girls: all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises and then still more curves." - H.E. Bates, A Love of Flowers "We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike." - Evelyn Underhill "One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides." - W.E. Johns, The Passing Show "My garden will never make me famous, I'm a horticultural ignoramus." - Ogden Nash "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." - Marcel Proust The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. - George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932 "I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden." - John Erskine "If I'm ever reborn, I want to be a gardener - there's too much to do for one lifetime!" - Karl Foerster "Gardening is something you learn by doing - and by making mistakes, like cooking, gardening is a constant process of experimentation, repeating the successes and throwing out the failures." - Carol Stocker "Tickle the earth with a hoe, it will laugh a harvest." - Mary Cantell "An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life." - Cora Lea Bell "Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul." - The Koran "Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years." - Anon "We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden." - Anon "The best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow." - Anon "God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done." - Anon "Plant carrots in January and you'll never have to eat carrots." - Anon "Cares melt when you kneel in your garden." - Anon "You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt." - Anon "A garden is a friend you can visit any time." - Anon "We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden." - Anon "He who plants a tree, plants a hope." - Anon "As the garden grows, so does the gardener" - Anon "Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow." - Anon "Where but in a garden do summer hours pass so quickly?" - Anon Proverbs "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." - Greek "All gardeners know better than other gardeners." - Chinese "If you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden." - Chinese "He who plants a garden plants happiness." - Chinese "The garden is the poor man's apothecary." - German On Weeds and Weeding A good garden may have some weeds. - Proverb "Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste." - William Shakespeare "Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them" - A. A. Milne, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh "A flower is an educated weed." - Luther Burbank, botanist 1849 – 1926 "I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so 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 "A weed is but an unloved flower." - Ella Wilcox, author and poet, 1850 - 1919 "I guess a good gardener always starts as a good weeder." - Amos Pettingill, clergyman, 1780 - 1830. "Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone." - Dennis Breeze, scriptwriter "A weed is a plant that is not only in the wrong place, but intends to stay." - Sara Stein, author of My Weeds: A Gardener's Botany "Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made By singing 'Oh how wonderful' and sitting in the shade, While better men than we go out, and start their working lives By grubbing weeds from garden paths with broken dinner knives." - Rudyard Kipling, author, 1865 – 1936 "The philosopher who said that work well done never needs doing over never weeded a garden." - Ray D. Everson I always think of my sins when I weed. They grow apace in the same way and are harder still to get rid of. - Helena Rutherfurd Ely, A Woman's Hardy Garden, 1903 "A weed is no more than a flower in disguise." - James Russell Lowell, The Growth of a Legend, 1847 "What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878 What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place? - Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist, 1825 - 1895 "Nature abhors a garden." - Michael Pollan, journalist and academic 1955 - "A man of words and not deeds, Is like a garden full of weeds." - Nursery rhyme "But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit. Weeds are people's idea, not nature's." - Anon "It is not enough for a gardener to love flowers; he must also hate weeds." - Anon "When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant." - Anon
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