One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to cultivate that happy peace of mind which is satisfied with little. He will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary ideals, for gardens are coquettish, particularly with the novice.
I also know that we should cultivate our gardens.
I've always felt that having a garden is like having a good and loyal friend.
In my garden, which is a big garden, I have one part that is my bird garden, and every morning, 365 days a year, they get buckets of food - for the birds, for the squirrels, the chipmunks and the turtles in the summer.
I grow all kinds of annuals. I have a nice perennial border in the front of the house.
The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.
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.
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.
I do the gardening.
The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favorites; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.
The Earth is our environment to protect and the garden to tend to.
If gardeners will forget a little the phrase, "watering the plants" and think of watering as a matter of "watering the earth" under the plants, keeping up its moisture content and gauging its need, the garden will get on very well.
I'm a huge garden and landscape fanatic.
My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered.
Well tended garden is better than a neglected wood lot.
And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.
I love decorating my home. I'm a gardener too, so that's usually something I have to play catch up with.
Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.
It takes a lot of mulch, love does, to create a froth.
A garden must be looked unto and dressed as the body.
As Paradise (though of God's own Planting) was no longer Paradise than the Man was put into it, to dress it and to keep it, so nor will our Gardens remain long in their perfection unless they are also continually cultivated.
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.
We're all assigned a piece of the garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform.
A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it.
Adam was a gardener, and God, who made him, sees that half of all good gardening is done upon the knees.
