As the grey days of winter approach this is the time gardeners seek out their seed catalogs, dream of next year's garden and wax poetic about the garden.
What are your favorite garden quotes?
For me, it begins with the children’s story of Frederick the field mouse by Leo Lionni. Of the many I read to my (now grown) daughter years ago, this may be my favorite.
While the other field mice work to gather grain and nuts for winter, Frederick sits on a sunny rock by himself. “I gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days,” he tells them. Another day he gathers “colors,” and then “words.” And when the food runs out, it is Frederick, the dreamer and poet, whose endless store of supplies warms the hearts of his fellow mice, and feeds their spirits with poetry during the darkest winter days. This is how I sometimes feel hibernating in my office, dreaming up ideas for gardens to offer my clients.
Thus said, here are several of my favorite garden quotes. Please share some of yours.
"Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart." -Russell Page
"The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies." -Gertrude Jekyll
"If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk in my garden forever." -Alfred Lord Tennyson
"I always think of my sins when I weed." -Helen Rutherford Ely
"I have a garden of my own,
shining with flowers of every hue,
I loved it dearly while alone,
but I shall love it more with you." -Thomas Moore
"In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death." -Sam Llewelyn
"Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes." -Author Unknown
"My wife’s a water sign. I’m an earth sign. Together we make mud." -Rodney Dangerfield
"No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green it wakes into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted to the sower to live to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith." -Albert Schweitzer
"A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space – a place not just set apart but reverberant – and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry." -Michael Pollan
