Quotes

Delphiniums at NYBG--photo copyright Anne Underwood Enslow“At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous.”
-Mirabel Osler

“Working in the garden . . . gives me a profound feeling of inner peace. Nothing here is in a hurry. There is no rush toward accomplishment, no blowing of trumpets. Here is the great mystery of life and growth. Everything is changing, growing, aiming at something, but silently, unboastfully, taking its time.”
-Ruth Stout

“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.”
-Rachel Carson

“Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration.”
-Lou Erickson

“The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessing crowd round me at every step–it it there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel; it is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover.”
-Elizabeth, Countess Russell

“It matters not what goal you seek – its secret here reposes:
you’ve got to dig from week to week – to get results on roses.”
-Edgar Guest

NYBG--photo Anne Underwood Enslow“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”
-Claude Monet

“I don’t enjoy reading about gardening. It’s like reading about music, you can’t. You’ve just got to experience it.”
-Barbara Kaufman

“Roses–it would seem that nothing new can be seen or said about them anymore. But somehow it does not affect them at all. Here they bloom, each new flower opening to its own untouched beauty, as if there had never been another flower before it nor were one ever to come after it.”
-Ilse Buchert Nesbitt

“A real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil . . . If he came into the Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say: ‘Good Lord, what humus!'”
-Kabel Capek

“The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.”
-Phyllis McGinley

“A vegetable garden in full production reminds me of the dessert cart in a fine restaurant. Where to focus, what to choose? Must it be only one?”
-Marie Iannotti

Angelonia--photo copyright Anne Underwood Enslow“I think this is what hooks one on gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at the Creation.”
-Phyllis Theroux

“My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant’s point of view.”
-H. Fred Ale

“To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.”
-Wendell Berry

“If ‘heartache’ sounds exaggerated then surely you have never gone to your garden one rare morning in June to find that the frost, without any perceptible motive, any hope of personal gain, has quietly killed your strawberry blossoms, tomatoes, lima and green beans, corn, squash, cucumbers. A brilliant sun is now smiling at this disaster with an insensitive cheerfulness as out of place as a funny story would be if someone you loved had just died.”
-Ruth Stout

“There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.”
-Kathleen Norris

Gloriosa daisy--photo copyright Anne Underwood Enslow“I used to love my garden,–
But now my love is dead,
For I found a bachelor’s button
In black-eyed Susan’s bed.”
-Anonymous

And finally, this riddle:
Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?
A: Pumpkin pi

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