Gardening teaches patience, humility, and the fact that nature will do what it wants regardless of your plans. These quotes come from green thumbs and casual planters who found something deeper in the dirt than they expected.
“It is like the seed put in the soil - the more one sows, the greater the harvest.”
“In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.”
“In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.”
“It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.”
“I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.”
“A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.”
“I am a particular fan of integrative exercise - that is, exercise that occurs in the course of doing some productive activity such as gardening, bicycling to work, doing home improvement projects and so on.”
“My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.”
“Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.”
“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.”
“It is like the seed put in the soil - the more one sows, the greater the harvest.”
“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.”
“A good garden may have some weeds.”
“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.”
“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.”
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”