I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

— Willa Cather, from My Antonia

The kiss of sun for pardon, / The song of the birds for mirth, / One is nearer God’s heart in a garden / Than anywhere else on earth.

 — Dorothy Frances Gurney

There’s little risk in becoming overly proud of one’s garden because by its very nature it is humbling. It has a way of keeping you on your knees.

— JoAnn R. Barwick

Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.

 — Phyllis McGinley

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

But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit. Weeds are people’s idea, not nature’s.

— Anonymous

Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.

— William Wordsworth

My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.

 — Margaret Bourke-White

Crabgrass can grow on bowling balls in airless rooms, and there is no known way to kill it that does not involve nuclear weapons.

— Dave Barry

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

 — Alfred Austin

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

Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall.

— Robert Frost

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.

 — Gertrude Jekyll

There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises. It sounds very well to garden a “natural way.” You may see the natural way in any desert, any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell. Defiance, on the other hand, is what makes gardeners.

— Henry Mitchell

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

 — Wendell Berry