Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity.
Lindley Karstens

None can have a healthy love for flowers unless he loves the wild ones.
Forbes Watson

Flowers leave some of their fragrance in the hand that bestows them.
Chinese proverb

Cares melt when you kneel in your garden.

Peace is the fruit of activity, not of sleep.
Ancient Egyptian proverb

 The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn't simple.
Doris Janzen Longacre

 If there's one thing I can say about my garden, it can always surprise me.
David Hobson

  To garden, you open your personal space to admit a few, a great many, or thousands of plants which exude charm, pleasure, beauty, oxygen, conversation, friendship, confidence, and other rewards should you succeed in meeting their basic needs.  This is why people garden.  It can be easy but challenging, and the rewards are priceless.
Tom Clothier

My spirit was lifted and my soul nourished by my time in the garden. It gave me a calm connection with all of life, and an awareness that remains with me now, long after leaving the garden.
Nancy Ross

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
Emma Goldman

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Claude Monet

Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.
Luther Burbank

Bread feeds the body indeed, but the flowers also feed the soul.
The Koran

When all the chores are done, the avid gardener will invent some new ones.
Anon

How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.
Benjamin Disraeli

  A small garden, accordingly, gives its owner a far greater opportunity to express himself ... in a garden any man may be an artist, may experiment with all the subtleties or simplicities of line, mass, color, and composition, and taste the god-like joys of the creator.
H. G. Dwight, Gardens and Gardening, Atlantic Monthly, 1912

As is the garden such is the gardener. A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds.
Francis Bacon

 What do we look for as reward? Some little sounds, and scents, and scenes. A small hand darting strawberry-ward. A woman's aprons full of greens.

The sense that we have brought to birth. Out of the cold and heavy soil, The blessed fruits and flowers of earth. Is large reward for our toil.
Ruth Pitter, The Diehards, 1941

Trees are the best monuments that a man can erect to his own memory. They speak his praises without flattery, and they are blessings to children yet unborn.
Lord Orrery, 1749

I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at.  I know the beauty of our Lord by it.
Gerald Manley Hopkins

Gardening takes a plot of land, a hoe and willing muscles. Scratching the soil, harvesting garden fruits, are peaceful results. With a garden, there is hope.
Grace Firth

  The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.
Hanna Rion

He who plants a garden plants happiness.
If you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden.
Chinese Proverb

Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.
Author Unknown

Garden: One of a vast number of free outdoor restaurants operated by charity-minded amateurs in an effort to provide healthful, balanced meals for insects, birds and animals.
Henry Beard and Roy McKie, Gardener's Dictionary

 Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.
Alfred Austin

Oak before Ash and we're in for a splash, Ash before Oak and we're in for a soak.
Traditional - which leaves emerge first and the coming summers weather.

Gardening is an exercise in optimism. Sometimes, it is a triumph of hope over experience.

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.
Elizabeth Murray

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, 1892 – 1962

Gardening is ultimately a folly whose goal is to provide delight.
Deborah Needleman

Spring has arrived when you can set your foot on 7 daisies at once.
Traditional

The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part ploughman.
He modifies the climate around his home.
John R. Whiting

It is always exciting to open the door and go out into the garden for the first time on any day.
Marion Cran

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

Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity.
John Evelyn, 1666

A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith,
the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise.
Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener, 1962

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

I don't think we'll ever know all there is to know about gardening, and I'm just as glad
there will always be some magic about it!
Barbara Damrosch

  A garden always gives back more than it receives.
Mara Beamish

The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.
Charles Dudley Warner

 Gardening is a humbling experience.
Martha Stewart

  I also know that we should cultivate our gardens.
Voltaire, Candide

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

  Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.
Alice Morse Earle, 1897

Gardening is the purest of human pleasures.
Francis Bacon

 Gardening takes a plot of land, a hoe and willing muscles. Scratching the soil, harvesting garden fruits, are peaceful results.  With a garden, there is hope.
Grace Firth

All gardens are a form of autobiography.
Robert Dash

 The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.
Hanna Rion

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds,
and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race,
the most satisfactory thing a man can do.
Charles Dudley Warner

To create a garden is to search for a better world.  In our effort to improve on nature, we are guided by a vision of paradise.  Whether the result is a horticultural masterpiece or only a modest vegetable patch, it is based on the expectation of a glorious future.  This hope for the future is at the heart of all gardening.
Marina Schinz

Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
Author Unknown

A garden is the best alternative therapy.
Germaine Greer

I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation.
Phyllis Theroux

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.
Heinrich Heine

The Earth Laughs in Flowers
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Flowers are not made by singing "Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade.
Rudyard Kipling

In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.
Kozuko Okakura

 Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Old time is still a-flying
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
Robert Herrick

Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole.
Mark Twain

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
William Blake

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
Chinese proverb

Some lives, like evening primroses, blossom most beautifully in the evening of life.

The great challenge for the garden designer is not to make the garden look natural, but to make the garden so that the people in it will feel natural.
Lawrence Halprin

If you would have a lovely garden, you should live a lovely life.
Shaker saying

  He who cultivates a garden, and brings to perfection flowers and fruits cultivates and advances at the same time his own nature.
Ezra Weston, 1845

Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years.
Author Unknown

God Almighty first planted a garden; and indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.  It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks.
Frances Bacon, 1625

Gardens are inevitably a trade-off of successes and failures.
Rebecca Rupp

 Every garden is a chore sometimes, but no real garden is nothing but a chore.
Nancy Grasby

He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the plants, the waters, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments - is the rich and royal man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

To garden is to let optimism get the better of judgment.
Eleanor Perenyi