Last Updated: March 15, 2023 by Quote.cc Team
Gardening is the art and science of cultivating and caring for plants. It is a popular activity for many people, whether they have a small balcony or a large backyard. Gardening can provide many benefits, such as fresh produce, beautiful flowers, a sense of accomplishment, and relaxation.
There are many different types of gardening, including vegetables, flowers, herbs, and containers. Vegetable gardening involves growing edible plants such as tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, and spices. Flower gardening focuses on cultivating various flowers for their beauty and aesthetic appeal. Herb gardening involves growing herbs for cooking or medicinal purposes. Container gardening is ideal for those with limited space or who want to grow plants indoors.
Regardless of the type of gardening, some basic principles apply to all forms of gardening. These include selecting the right plants for the location and soil, providing adequate water and nutrients, controlling pests and diseases, and proper pruning and maintenance.
Gardening can also have a positive impact on the environment. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, which helps to mitigate climate change. They also provide habitat for wildlife, support biodiversity, and improve air and water quality.
Overall, gardening is a rewarding and fulfilling activity that can benefit both the gardener and the environment. Words of wisdom from famous people, books, and historians might motivate you to work on the garden. We’ve rounded up inspirational garden quotes and gardening sayings to inspire your spirits.
Read on for wisdom on plants, flowers, weeds, and what gardening means.
170 Inspirational Gardening Quotes And Sayings
Top 10 Gradening Quotes
“I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me.” – Robert Breault
“I enjoy painting, cutting the lawn and working in the garden when I have time. That’s therapy for me. I enjoy working with my hands.” – Billy Williams
“I’ve always felt that having a garden is like having a good and loyal friend.” – C. Z. Guest
“It’s true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else.” – Viggo Mortensen
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.” – Oscar Wilde
“Kiss of the sun for pardon. Song of the birds for mirth. You’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than any place else on earth.” – Dorothy Frances Gurney
“Life begins the day you start a garden.” – Chinese Proverb
“On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.” – Maya Angelou
“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
“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
What Is Gardening?
“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.” – May Sarton
“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
“A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant – rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance – but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.” – Roberto Burle Marx
“Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes.”
“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.” –
“Gardening is a work of a lifetime: you never finish.” – Oscar de la Renta
“Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it.”
“Gardening is a humbling experience.” – Martha Stewart
“Gardening is the greatest tonic and therapy a human being can have. Even if you have only a tiny piece of earth, you can create something beautiful, which we all have a great need for. If we begin by respecting plants, it’s inevitable we’ll respect people.” – Audrey Hepburn
“Gardening is not a rational act.” – Margaret Atwood
“Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That’s the fun of them. You’re always learning.” – Helen Mirren
“Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colors.” – Oscar de la Renta
“Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well.” – Monty Don
“The garden is the poor man’s apothecary.” – German Proverb
“The garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature.” – Jeff Cox
“If I’m in the country, my big idea is to do nothing. It means talking, it means cooking with the leftovers in the fridge – l’art d’accommoder les restes – it means gardening.” – Christian Louboutin
Best Gradening Quotes
“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” – Liberty Hyde Bailey
“Creating your own urban farm is as simple as planting your flowerbeds with edibles.”
“Do not spread the compost on the weeds.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“Essential advice for the gardener: grow peas of mind, lettuce be thankful, squash selfishness, turnip to help thy neighbor, and always make thyme for loved ones.”
“Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” – Peter Zumthor
“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
“Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.” – Luther Burbank
“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.” – Sigmund Freud
“Flowers are the music of the ground. From earth’s lips spoken without sound.” – Edwin Curran
“From plants that wake when others sleep, from timid jasmine buds that keep their odour to themselves all day, but when the sunlight dies away let the delicious secret out to every breeze that roams about.” – Thomas Moore
“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.” – Rudyard Kipling
“Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.” – May Sarton
“I also like to garden. I grow things, vegetables, flowers… I particularly like orchids. I raise orchids.” – Beau Bridges
“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
“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
“I know that if odour were visible, as colour is, I’d see the summer garden in rainbow clouds.” – Robert Bridges
“I know the pleasure of pulling up root vegetables. They are solvable mysteries.” – Novella Carpenter
“I like gardening — it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.” – Alice Sebold
“I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation.” – Phyllis Theroux
“I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.” – Joseph Addison
“I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.” – Abraham Lincoln
“In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful.” – Abram L. Urban
“No one will understand a Japanese garden until you’ve walked through one, and you hear the crunch underfoot, and you smell it, and you experience it over time. Now there’s no photograph or any movie that can give you that experience.” – J. Carter Brown
“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.” – Dale Carnegie
“The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.” – Monty Don
“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.” – Joel Salatin
“The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.” – Stephen Gardiner
“There are no happier folks than plant lovers and none more generous than those who garden.” – Ernest Wilson
“There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.” – Mirabel Osler
“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
“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.” – Voltaire
“When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden.” – Minnie Aumonier
“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.” – Thomas Jefferson
Short Gradening Quotes
“The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.” – Gertrude Jekyll
“Life’s a garden — dig it.” – Gardening Saying
“A garden always has a point.” – Elizabeth Hoyt, The Raven Prince
“A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.” – Dogen
“A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.” – Zen Shin
“A flower blossoms for its own joy.” – Oscar Wilde
“A brier rose whose buds yield fragrant harvest for the honey bee.” – Letitia Elizabeth Landon
“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.” – Michael Pollan
“A good garden may have some weeds.” – Thomas Fuller
“All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.” – Chinese proverb
“All gardening is landscape painting.” – William Kent
“All gardeners know better than other gardeners.” – Chinese Proverb
“Anyone who has time for drama is not gardening enough.”
“By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.” – Rabindranath Tagore
“Coffee. Garden. Coffee. Does a good morning need anything else?” – Betsy Cañas Garmon
“Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.” – Theodore Roethke
“Despite the gardener’s best intentions, Nature will improvise.” – Michael P. Garofalo
“Earth laughs in flowers.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Farming is a profession of hope.” – Brian Brett
“Flowers are happy things.” – P. G. Wodehouse
“Gardeners learn by trowel and error.” – Gardening Saying
“Garden as though you will live forever.” – William Kent
“Gardening adds years to your life, and life to your years.”
“Gardening requires lots of water — most of it in the form of perspiration.” – Lou Erickson
“Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything — except itself.”
“Gardens are a form of autobiography.” – Sydney Eddison
“God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.”
“Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.” – Mrs. C.W. Earle
“He plants trees to benefit another generation.” – Caecilius Statius
“Housework is for people who don’t know how to garden”
“How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.” – Alexander Smith
“How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“I like solitary pursuits, such as reading or pottering about in the garden.” – Hayley Mills
“I need my friends, I need my house, I need my garden.” – Miranda Richardson
“If a tree dies, plant another in its place.” – Carl Linnaeus
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
“In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener.” – Robert Rodale
“In every gardener there is a child who believes in The Seed Fairy.” – Robert Breault
“In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it.” – Frank McKinney Hubbard
“In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.” – Alice Walker
“Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there.” – Thomas Fuller
“My garden is my favorite teacher.” – Betsy Cañas Garmon
“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece” – Claude Monet
“Old gardeners never die, they just go to seed.”
“One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides.” – W.E. Johns
“Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.” – Alfred Austin
“The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.” – Hanna Rion
“The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.” – Elizabeth Lawrence
“The more help a person has in the garden, the less it belongs to him.” – W H Davies
“The most lasting and pure gladness comes to me from my gardens.” – Lillie Langtry
“There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.” – Janet Kilburn Phillips
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn
“To dwell is to garden.” – Martin Heidegger
“What’s a butterfly garden without butterflies?” – Roy Rogers
“Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.” – William Cowper
Funny Gradening Quotes
“A gardener’s best tool is the knowledge from previous seasons. And it can be recorded in a $2 notebook.”
“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.” – Gertrude Stein
“A weed is but an unloved flower.” – Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“A weed is a plant that is not only in the wrong place but intends to stay.” – Sara Stein
“A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.” – Doug Larson
“Anybody who wants to rule the world should try to rule a garden first.”
“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
“Don’t wear perfume in the garden — unless you want to be pollinated by bees.” – Anne Raver
“Fertilizer does no good in a heap, but a little spread around works miracles all over.” – Richard Brinsley Sheridan
“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.” – Francis Bacon
“I love being in my garden. I don’t plant a lot of exotic flora, but I do spend a lot of time outside doing manual labour.” – Jacqueline Bisset
“I love decorating my home. I’m a gardener too, so that’s usually something I have to play catch up with.” – Suzy Bogguss
“I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don’t like tidying up the garden afterwards.” – Jamaica Kincaid
“My extravagance is my garden – it’s the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.” – Ina Garten
“My neighbour asked if he could use my lawnmower and I told him of course he could, so long as he didn’t take it out of my garden.” – Eric Morecambe
“The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.” – George Bernard Shaw
“The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.” – Michael Pollan
“The philosopher who said that work well done never needs doing over never weeded a garden.” – Ray D Everson
“We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.” – Evelyn Underhill
“Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.” – Marcelene Cox (See also: weather quotes)
Inspirational Gardening Quotes
“A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.” – D. Elton Trueblood
“A person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.” – Liberty Hyde Bailey
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” – Greek Proverb
“An optimistic gardener is one who believes that whatever goes down must come up.” – Leslie Hall
“Clarity is the most important thing. I can compare clarity to pruning in gardening. You know, you need to be clear. If you are not clear, nothing is going to happen. You have to be clear. Then you have to be confident about your vision. And after that, you just have to put a lot of work in.” – Diane von Furstenberg
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized.” – Allan Armitage
“I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.” – Walt Disney
“I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.” – Penelope Keith
“I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit.” – Reginald Farrer
“If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.” – Robert Brault
“It is a good idea to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.” – James Douglas
“Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.” – Helen Keller
“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.” – Andrew Weil
“No single sort of garden suits everyone. Shut your eyes and dream of the garden you’d most love then open your eyes and start planting. Loved gardens flourish, boring ones are hard work.” – Jackie French
“Plan a garden for the future, but expect it to evolve and need changing, despite your well laid-out plans. Such is the temperament of Mother Nature.” – Meredith Kirton
“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
“There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.” – Alfred Austin
“Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden.” – Doris Day
“Well tended garden is better than a neglected wood lot.” – Dixie Lee Ray
“What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
Gradening Quotes For Spring
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” – Margaret Atwood
“I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.” – Ruth Stout
“It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.” – B.C. Forbes
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.” – Pablo Neruda
“Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.” – Gerard de Nerval
“Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s party!’” – Robin Williams
“I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose, I would always greet it in a garden.” – Ruth Stout
“Spring has returned. The earth is like a child that knows poems.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“The earth laughs in flowers.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.” – John Muir
“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” – Iris Murdoch
“I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.” – Emma Goldman
“Loveliest of lovely things are they on earth that soonest pass away. The rose that lives its little hour is prized beyond the sculptured flower.” – William C. Bryant
Final Thoughts
Gardening is a rewarding and beneficial activity with many physical, mental, and environmental benefits. Whether you are an experienced gardener or just starting, there are many ways to get involved in gardening and enjoy its many benefits.
One of the primary benefits of gardening is that it provides an opportunity to connect with nature and the outdoors. Gardening can help reduce stress, improve mood, and promote relaxation, making it a great way to unwind after a long day or week.
In addition to the mental and emotional benefits, gardening also offers physical benefits. Gardening can be a great way to get exercise, stay active, and develop skills and knowledge related to plants and the environment.
Gardening also has many environmental benefits. Growing your food can help reduce your carbon footprint and promote sustainable living. Additionally, gardening can provide habitats for wildlife, promote biodiversity, and help reduce air and water pollution.
In short, gardening is a beautiful way to improve your health and well-being, connect with nature, and contribute to a more sustainable future. Whether you have a small balcony or a large backyard, there are many ways to get involved in gardening and enjoy its many benefits.
What are your favorite gardening quotes or wise words? Let me know!