Liberty Hyde Bailey Quotes

Being in touch with the natural world is crucial.

I think, living in the city, it's so easy to forget that you're attached to the earth.

Even rain and wind and stormy clouds bring joy, just as knowing animals and flowers and where they live.

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

I think every pet lover has an appreciation for nature - I've never met an animal lover who didn't have some kind of connection to the natural world.

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

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

Mother of Marvels, mysterious and tender Nature, why do we not live more in thee.

It is the last thing we learn, / listening to the creature world.

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

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

A garden is one of the few expressions of man's nature that is altogether benign.

In fine weather the old gentelman is almost constantly in the garden; and when it is too wet to go into it, he will look out the window at it, by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging, and sweeping, and cutting, and planting, with manifest delight.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.

They set great store by their gardens . . . Their studie and deligence herein commeth not only of pleasure, but also of a certain strife and contention . . . concerning the trimming, husbanding, and furnishing of their gardens; everye man or his owne parte.

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

Whatever trips you make, you must still have nature in your eye.

To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace.