John Burnside Quotes

Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.

Gardening as far as Gardening is Art, or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a Garden.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

The fabric of a garden is determined as much by its textures as by its tonal range and architectural flair.

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

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.

I've got my organic veg patch and fruit; we're very garden-obsessed, my husband and I. He designed a garden for me for Christmas, so beautiful! Alasdhair's very good at the proportion and ground work, and I come in and do the planting and the color scheme.

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

For fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment, but Pools mar all, and make the Garden unwholesome, and full of Flies and Frogs.

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.

The more contemplative gardener, seeing the garden as a whole, the design of it, and its nature as a still place of delight and refreshment, will wait and hope for the moment when it seems to achieve perfection. Awareness of when such moments are most likely helps to make them happen; they will not be entirely accidental but anticipated; everything will be planned to encourage them.

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.

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.

Some lawns have all the cheer of old cemeteries.

I like muddling things up; and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.

Last summer I was staying at a house in Hampshire which was famous for the brilliance and the originality of its gardens. There were many of them, but the most beautiful of all was a walled garden in which every flower was blue. There were all the obvious things like delphiniums and acronitums and larkspurs, but the most beautiful blue of all came from the groups of cabbages - the ordinary blue pickling cabbage. Set against the blazing blue of the other flowers, it had a bloom and elegance which made it a thing of the greatest delight.

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

A garden should be natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells.

There are few gardens that can be left alone. A few years of neglect and only the skeleton of a garden can be traced. . . . Japanese artists working with a few stones and sand four hundred years ago achieved strangely lasting compositions. However there, too, but for the hands that have piously raked the white sand into patterns and controlled the spread of moss and lichens, little would remain.

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

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.

A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man.

Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.