A good quote can inspire us or comfort us. They can provide solace when things become difficult, or guide us into a new perspective. The best quotes will perfectly encapsulate an experience or an emotion, providing us with the most ideal expression of the moment. Garden quotes are no exception. In fact, the best garden quotes can sum up the joy of plants better than any picture ever could.
Here is a collection of garden quotes that truly sum up the joy of experiencing the great outdoors.
Quotes for Garden Lovers
As these garden quotes show, you don’t have to be a skilled gardener to love gardening. You don’t have to spend every waking moment outside diligently weeding, watering, and planting. Ultimately, you don’t even have to have a garden of your own.
As these quotes show, you can simply appreciate other people’s efforts. Even simply spending some time outside can benefit both your mental and physical health.
“Life begins the day you start a garden.”
– Chinese proverb
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”
– Audrey Hepburn
“I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.”
– Ruth Stout
“The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.”
– Michael Pollan
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
“When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden.”
– Minnie Aumonier
“There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.”
– Janet Kilburn Phillips
“I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.”
– David Hobson
“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”
– Rudyard Kipling
“I like gardening — it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.”
– Alice Sebold
“However many years she lived, Mary always felt that ‘she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow.”
– Frances Hodgson Burnett
“Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than emperors.”
– Mary Cantwell
“The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul.”
– Sir Thomas More
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
– Greek proverb
“The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.”
– Gertrude Jekyll
“All gardeners know better than other gardeners.”
– Chinese proverb
Quotes About the joy of Flowers
Flowers, weeds, and various other forms of plant life bring so much color to a garden. They can also attract birds, bees, and insects. It’s little wonder, therefore, that so many people appreciate flowers of all shapes and sizes. Here are a collection of garden quotes all about the joy of flowers.
“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”
– Claude Monet
“In joy or sadness flowers are our constant friends.”
– Okakura Kakuzo
“A flower blossoms for its own joy.”
– Oscar Wilde
“A weed is but an unloved flower.”
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“Almost every person, from childhood, has been touched by the untamed beauty of wildflowers.”
– Lady Bird Johnson
“What a lovely thing a rose is!”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.”
– A.A. Milne
“The earth laughs in flowers.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.”
– George Eliot
“A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.”
– Doug Larson
“At Christmas I no more desire a rose,
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows.”
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
– Henri Matisse
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.”
– William Shakespeare
“Flowers will always try, and look their best, no matter what the season or reason.”
– Anthony T. Hincks
“A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in–what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.”
– Victor Hugo
“I must have flowers, always, and always.”
- Claude Monet
Garden Quotes for Fruit and Vegetable Growers
Whether you simply tend a few herb plants, or manage a small plot with dreams of self sufficiency, your hard work has also not gone unnoticed. Here are some of the best garden quotes about growing your own fruit and vegetables.
“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.”
– Lewis Grizzard
“Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food.”
– Hippocrates
“Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?
Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Digging potatoes is always an adventure, somewhat akin to fishing. There is forever the possibility that the next cast—or the next thrust of the digging fork—will turn up a clunker.”
– Jerome Belanger
“My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.”
– Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra
“Better to eat vegetables and fear no creditors, than eat duck and hide from them.”
– The Talmud
“In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.”
– Carl Sandburg
“Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.”
– E. B. White
“The first gatherings of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby—how could anything so beautiful be mine? And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.”
– Alice B. Toklas
“For all things produced in a garden, whether of salads or fruits, a poor man will eat better that has one of his own, than a rich man that has none.”
– J.C. Loudoun
“A strawberry blossom will not sweeten dry bread.”
– Buganda Proverb
“I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted.
They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.”
– Dave Barry
“Now in the east
the white bean
and the great squash
are tied with the rainbow.
Listen! the rain’s drawing near!
The voice of the bluebird is heard.”
– Navaho Chant
“What was paradise, but a garden full of vegetables and herbs and pleasure? Nothing there but delights.”
– William Lawson
“He who sows peas on the highway does not get all the pods into his barn.”
– Danish Proverb
As we have seen, gardens—and the act of gardening—have inspired many poetic words. These garden quotes may also have inspired you to begin your own garden, or as Robert Brault once put it, “If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.”
It’s never too late to start your own garden, even if it’s just a few sun-loving plants in pots on a patio. Remember: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” (Author unknown)
I will leave you with one final garden quote. This one by William Kent will hopefully inspire you to do great things with your own plot of earth, however modest it may be:
“Garden as though you will live forever.”
