60 Inspirational Quotes About Gardening

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Starting a Garden

1. If you have a garden in your library, everything will be complete. –Marcus Tullius Cicero
2. Life begins the day you start a garden. – Chinese proverb
3. There are always flowers for those who want to see them. – Henri Matisse
4. He who plants a garden plants happiness. – Chinese proverb
5. More grows in the garden than the gardener sows. – Spanish proverb
6. Gardening is cheaper than therapy – and you get tomatoes. – unknown
7. Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well. – Monty Don
8. Most plants taste better when they’ve had to suffer a little. –  Diana Kennedy

Gardens Are Hard Work

1. Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade. –Rudyard Kipling
2. Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized. – Allan Armitage
3. A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. – May Sarton 
4. 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
5. Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration. – Lou Erickson
6. In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it. – Frank McKinney Hubbard
7. When gardening, I have one gift you won’t find in any manuals – I know it’s strange, but I can change perennials to annuals. – Dick Emmons (poem)

Gardening as an Artform

1. All gardening is landscape painting. – William Kent
2. Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are. – Alfred Austin
3. The garden is the poor man’s apothecary. – German proverb
4. The tomato hides its griefs. Internal damage is hard to spot. – Julia Child
5. A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins. – Laurie Colwin
6. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that. – Edna Ferber
7. 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

Fulfillment from Gardening

1. Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than emperors. – Mary Cantwell
2. If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden. – Robert Brault
3. The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives. – Gertrude Jekyll
4. 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
5. The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. – Gertrude Jekyll
6. I like gardening. It’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself. – Alice Sebold 
7. God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. – Francis Bacon
8. When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden. – Minnie Aumonier
9. 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
10. I’ve always felt that having a garden is like having a good and loyal friend. – C Z Guest
11. Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution than we used to be. – E. B. White

An Ode to Weeds

1. “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows. – Doug Larson
3. Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them. – A.A. Milne
4. Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone. – Jean Jacques Rousseau
5. To an optimist every weed is a flower; to a pessimist every flower is a weed. – Finnish proverb
6. The philosopher who said that “work well done never needs doing over” never weeded a garden.” – Ray D Everson

Appreciation of the Earth

1. The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway. –Michael Pollan
2. 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
3. I always see gardening as escape, as peace really. If you are angry or troubled, nothing provides the same solace as nurturing the soil. – Monty Don
4. In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. – Alice Walker
5. The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure. . . . a tomato, an adventure. – Muriel Barbery
6. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. – Michael Pollan
7. I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden. – Ruth Stout

Garden Humor Quotes About Gardening

1. There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments. – Janet Kilburn Phillips
2. Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years. – Unknown
3. All gardeners know better than other gardeners. – Chinese proverb
4. Of plants, tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. – John Updike
5. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. – Miles Kington
6. This cabbage, these carrots, these potatoes, these onions … will soon become me. Such a tasty fact! – Mike Garofalo
7. 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
8. Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks, and burn them; they love it. – S. J. Perelman
9. Last night we had three small zucchini for dinner that were grown within fifty feet of our back door. I estimate they cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $371.49 each. – Andy Rooney

The Circle of Life Quotes About Gardening

1. A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. – Greek proverb
2. Garden as though you will live forever. – William Kent
3. To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. – Audrey Hepburn
4. Old gardeners never die, they just go to seed. – unknown

What are your favorite quotes about gardening? Share them with us in the comments!

Discover 10 top tips for growing, harvesting, and enjoying fruits, vegetables, herbs and more from your home garden—when you access the FREEBIE How to Grow a Vegetable Garden, right now!

Yes! I want this FREE guide!