Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

It does seem to me that the British in particular, British horticultural literature and television programmes, focus a huge amount on how we garden and hardly at all on why we garden.

I love gardens!

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

I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens. I can not bear gardening, but I love gardens.

It's my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they've got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very minor role.

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.

I'm a self-taught landscape gardener; it's a real passion of mine. It's what I do in my spare time because trees don't ask questions!

I'm a huge garden and landscape fanatic.

I have a great love for nature. That must have started somewhere down back home, I think, because my family own one of the better known gardens in Soochow, so I played there, and I lived there, and so I must have absorbed something there. So I continue to have a great interest in nature.

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

My favorite thing is landscaping. I love landscaping. And so what I'll do is, mostly I put language into search engines, and if I want to look, like, at tulip gardens, or, like, Georgian gardens, i love English gardens, how they're laid out. Japanese gardens, Asian gardens. So, I'm kind of a frustrated landscaper.

Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.

A garden scheme should have a backbone - a central idea beautifully phrased.

To plant and maintain a flower border, with a good scheme for colour, is by no means the easy thing that is commonly supposed.

What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.

Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal.

I fell in love with my country - its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. No one can take my love of country away from me! I felt then, as I do now, it's a rich, fertile, beautiful land, capable of satisfying all the needs of its people. It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class.

I am actually looking most forward to seeing the country again. It's a wonderful town and the wilderness around there is beautiful. The falls there were an inspiration in my book My Side of the Mountain

A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece