Garden quotes and sayings

Gardens and the act of gardening have inspired writers and artists for centuries. Here is a collection of some of the best garden quotes and sayings:

 

The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.
Author unknown

 

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood

 

If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.
Bill Watterson

 

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.
Gertrude Jekyll

 

What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
Chinese Proverb

 

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.
Carl Linnaeus

 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
Greek Proverb
 

 

Gardening requires lots of water, most of it in the form of perspiration.
Lou Erickson

 

Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.
Rudyard Kipling

 

Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It’s an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.
Karel Capek

 

Garden is a verb, not a noun.
Amy Stewart

 

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.
Voltaire

 

Life begins the day you start a garden.
Chinese Proverb

 

Gardening is the work of a lifetime: you never finish.
Oscar de la Renta

 

Anyone who thinks gardening begins in the spring and ends in the fall is missing the best part of the whole year; for gardening begins in January with the dream.
Josephine Nuese

 

Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.
Anonymous

 

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.
Claude Monet

 

Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colors.
Oscar de la Renta

 

The best gardens are a perfect balance of order and chaos. The tension created by this constantly threatened balance is the pulse of the garden itself.
Helen Humphreys

 

Fruit tree pruning, and any pruning, really, is less of a science than it is a conversation. You prune, the tree answers, you prune again.
Ann Ralph

 

Trees have a tendency toward immortality.
Neville Fay

 

Never put off planting something or you will find that ten years later you are saying ‘If only we had planted that wisteria,” and you are filled with sad thoughts. It isn’t too late. Do it now, and if you don’t live to enjoy it, somebody else will.
A.A.Milne

 

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton

 

In the garden I tend to drop my thoughts here and there. To the flowers I whisper the secrets I keep and the hopes I breathe.
Dodinsky

 

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.
Alfred Austin

 

Plants contain the world. The garden, better than any college education, gave the world to me.
Jamaica Kincaid

 

God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.
Author Unknown

 

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handyman with a sense of humus.
E.B. White

 

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.
Gertrude Jekyll

 

I am more myself in a garden than anywhere else on earth.
Doug Green

 

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.
Gertrude Jekyll

 

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
Audrey Hepburn

 

Keep calm and garden on.
Unknown

 

Garden as though you will live forever.
William Kent

 

You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.
Author Unknown

 

If you keep putting your thumb in the soil it will eventually sprout and turn green.
Jennifer Arnott

 

If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. ‘Green fingers’ are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart.
Russell Page

 

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.
Fred Dale

 

There is no magic dust sprinkled on a newborn babe that endows them with green thumbedness. It’s not a knack, it’s not talent, and it’s not in your genes. Plants thrive for people that take care of them. If you can’t grow a plant, any plant, then you should probably not be trusted with a puppy.
Carole Reese

 

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
 A.A. Milne

 

Flowers are the music of the ground from earth’s lips spoken without sound.
Edwin Curran

 

The Gardener does not create the Garden. The Garden creates the Gardener.
Alan Chadwick

 

It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth, to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season.
Kate Morton

 

Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes
Unknown

 

Gardening is medicine that does not need a prescription and has no limit on dosage.
Author unknown

 

A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul.
Saadi

 

A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space—a place not just set apart but reverberant—and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
Michael Pollan

 

To potter with green growing things, watching each day to see the dear, new sprouts come up, is like taking a hand in creation, I think. Just now my garden is like faith—the substance of things hoped for.
Lucy Maud Montgomery

 

 

Have I missed any great garden quotes? What are your favourite garden quotes and sayings? Please share in the comments section below.  I intend to update this page over time, as I come across new (to me) words of inspiration about gardening.

 

Post updated: April 2018; April 2020