By Molly Day
August 20, 2008 06:29 pm
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Put down the rake, trowel and packet of seeds. Take a few minutes to consider the joys of nature and gardening in other people’s words.
“When in these fresh mornings I go into my garden before anyone is awake, I go for the time being into perfect happiness.”
— Celia Thaxter
“Every garden is unique with a multitude of choices in soils, plants and themes. Finding your garden theme is as easy as seeing what brings a smile to your face.”
— Teresa Watkins
“Oh, Adam was a gardener
And Got who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s
Work is done upon his knees”
— Rudyard Kipling
“A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.”
— James Dent
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“I never saw a discontented tree.”
— John Muir
“All my hurts my garden spade can heal.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Gardeners, like plants, invariably grow from small beginnings.”
— Geraldene Holt
“Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.”
— Standing Bear
“Each one has his own most real thing. Mine is the garden.”
— Louisa Y Kings
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
— Lao Tzu
“I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.”
— George Washington Carver
“Some people seem to forget that a plant is very like a human being. It is much nicer, of course, and much prettier, and much pleasanter than a human being, but we are bound to admit the resemblance.”
— Beverly Nichols
“For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.”
— Martin Luther
“The bountitude of nature is both infinite and infectious . . . contact with garden beauty sets free the better impulses of human nature.”
— E. H. Wilson
“Connection with gardens, even small ones, even potted plants, can become windows to the inner life. The simple act of stopping and looking at the beauty around us can be prayer.”
— Patricia R. Barrett
“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.”
— Vita Sackville-West
“An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life.”
— Cora Lea Bell
“Each within his green enclosure is a creator, and no two shall reach the same conclusion.”
— Louise Wilder
“At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous.”
— Mirabel
“Take an acorn and a shovel and plant a tree. When you replant the forest, you mend the planet.”
— Diana Beresford-Kroeger
“Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.”
— Phyllis McGinley
“Keep a green tree in your heart and the singing bird will come.”
— Chinese proverb
“The size of a garden has very little to do with its merit. It is merely an accident relating to the circumstances of the owner. It is the size of his heart and brain and goodwill that will make his garden either delightful or dull.”
— Gertrude Jekyll
“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.”
— Galileo
“Perhaps no word of six letters concentrates so much human satisfaction as the word garden.”
— Richard LeGallienne
“Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure undiluted, untouched joy.”
— Ann Morrow Lindbergh
“Flowers always make people better, happier and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the soul.”
— Luther Burbank
“Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”
— Thomas Jefferson
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