Garden-quotes

2WonderY (Ruth) inspired me with her quote of Voltaire's Candide: 'That's true enough,' said Candide; 'but we must go and work in the garden.

It would be fun to write down all the garden-quotes we have come across that inspire us, make us happy, make us laugh or whatever.

I like this one:
"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need" (Cicero)

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."

-- Charles Baudelaire

"There is nothing in the world as soothing as a well-cared-for vegetable garden. Charles says that people with nervous breakdowns ought to take camp-stools and sit in them all day."--from Henrietta's War by Joyce Dennys.

"Soyons reconnaissants aux personnes qui nous donnent du bonheur; elles sont les charmants jardiniers par qui nos âmes sont fleuries".
Marcel Proust

Gardens are a form of autobiography.
- Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993

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

Looky:

http://www.quotegarden.com/gardens.html

I love the one about how to tell the difference between a weed and a valuable plant!

Yes, how often have I done that particular "oops?"

Oh, yeah.

My brother once nearly ran the mower over a young lilac tree. I argued with him until he gave up and figured I could just get in trouble for preventing him from doing his chore. He later realized that I saved his little teenage life - our parents would not have been too happy if he'd run it over. :p

Rozax, your heroic story reminded me that my daughter used to throw herself in front of the mower so that I couldn't mow down the extremely invasive buttercups that drift through my yard untill they were done blooming. I still save the best drift now.

A very sweet drift it is, too.

Quote from a wall hanging a friend gave me "because it reminded him of me".... 'May all your weeds be wildflowers'.

If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk; for a year, get married; for a lifetime, get a garden.
(Chinese proverb).

I see what it's trying to say, but it strikes me as a little sad. ^^;

Just discovering Beverley Nichols and added his official website on the author page. They've got a page on quotes:
http://www.beverleynichols.com/excerpts.php

I particularly am taken by -

"To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat."

"Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,/ It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,/ It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such/ endless succession of diseased corpses,/ It distills exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,/ It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such/ leavings from them at last."

- Walt Whitman, "This Compost"

"I … invariably let optimism get the better of judgment, which come to think of it may be the first principle of gardening."

- Eleanor Perényi, Green Thoughts

'To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow' - Audrey Hepburn

We were bred of earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend, or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.

- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, in Cross Creek

“What was Eden but a garden”

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
- Margaret Atwood

I’d say every day, no matter the season.

Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

“To have a garden and be separated from it at sprouting and blooming time is worse than any soul separation that ever happened to any woman.”

Betty in Over Paradise Ridge