William Kent Quotes

I have a garden in my backyard that's completely organic, which I'm very proud of.

By having a direct stake and involvement with the process of plants growing, of having your hands in the soil and tending it carefully and with love, your world and everyone's else's world too, becomes a better place.

From my earliest memories, I loved the farm. My grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine and had a huge, well kept garden with an octagonal chicken house in the corner.

I've become really interested in permaculture, simplifying my life and doing everything I can to develop more of a sustainable lifestyle.

The public must learn how to cherish the nobler and rarer plants, and to plant the aloe, able to wait a hundred years for it's bloom, or it's garden will contain, presently, nothing but potatoes and pot-herbs.

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.

That's a big goal of mine, to try and grow as much of my own food as possible.

I started composting in 1970 by taking my food scraps out behind where I lived and burying them in a hole next to the railroad tracks - and green things started to grow there!

In Austin, the eco-capital of Texas, residents tend to favor native plants and wildflowers to the sculpted lawns of the Palm Springs variety.

Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they're tender. They have to be persistent.

I have raised beds, perennial beds, cut flower beds. I have an island on a pond that's just covered in peonies. I have an herb garden, tons of vegetables, raspberries. I have everything. I'm a green guy.

Let it endure forever

I feel very guilty about not having a vegetable garden, but it is quite time-consuming.

We have three and a half acres, complete with duck pond and wildflower meadow and open annually by appointment as part of the National Gardens Scheme.

I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.

I find it so exciting to grow your own food.

The ground's generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty! Try to be more like the ground.

Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.

My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.

My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.

Wherever you have a plot of land, however small, plant a garden. Staying close to the soil is good for the soul.

Live as if you were eternal.

Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissingthe tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.

To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes.