Top 100 The Gardener Quotes
#1. Tell me why the gardener trims and prunes his rosebushes, sometimes cutting away productive branches, and I will tell you why God's people are afflicted. God's hand never slips.
Billy Graham
#2. Far more gardens fail because the gardener is absent or not paying attention than because he or she lacks erudition. Yes, you need to know your ABCs [the basics], but the more you garden, the more you'll learn what works and what doesn't.
Barbara Damrosch
#3. Look, Lawrence, I know you never cared for me-"
Law cut him off.
"Cared for you? Cared for you? What am I? The gardener?"
"Okay, you always hated me-"
"Better," Law said. "You're wrong of course, but you said what you meant this time.
Jez Morrow
#4. 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
#5. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed.
Nelson Mandela
#6. and I thought how fucking unfair it was that he made us butterflies, of all things. Real butterflies could fly away, out of reach. The Gardener's Butterflies could only ever fall, and that but rarely.
Dot Hutchison
#7. You take souls for vegetables ... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#8. The gardener, an old sailor, made him a hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow. And here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to the vicarage, reading, reading passionately.
W. Somerset Maugham
#9. One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.
Wendell Berry
#10. The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions.
Ken Robinson
#11. The very best relationship has a gardener and a flower. The gardener nurtures and the flower blooms.
Carole Radziwill
#12. The gardener uses both roses in the flowerbed and thorns in making fences.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#13. I don't want to rot like mangoes at the end of the season, or burnout like the sun at the and of the day. I cannot live like the gardener, the cook and water-carrier, doing the same task everyday of my life ... I want to be either somebody or nobody. I don't want to be anybody.
Ruskin Bond
#14. All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows ...
Wendell Berry
#16. I once read that in any good marriage, one partner is the gardener and the other is the garden. We take it in turns to be either.
Meryl Streep
#17. A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space
a place not just set apart but reverberant
and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
Michael Pollan
#18. The gardener hath gathered up this autumn's leaves. Who shall see them again, or who wot of them? And who shall say what hath befallen in the days of long ago?
Lord Dunsany
#19. Charming," Puck commented, gazing around in distaste. "I love the barren, dead feel they're going for. Who's the gardener, I wonder? I'd love to get some tips.
Julie Kagawa
#21. Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.
Michael Pollan
#22. I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. John 15:1
Anonymous
#23. What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place?
Thomas Huxley
#24. After his death the gardener does not become a butterfly, intoxicated by the perfumes of the flowers, but a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous, and spicy delights of the soil.
Karel Capek
#25. As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. It is not the gardener that makes the garden. It is the garden that makes the gardener.
Alan Chadwick
#27. On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan.
Tan Twan Eng
#28. The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.
Vita Sackville-West
#29. Find the most delicate qualities within; then treat these qualities as tiny little seeds that you would plant in your heart, with you being the gardener.
John De Ruiter
#30. Today I am sure no one needs to be told that the more birds a yard can support, the fewer insects there will be to trouble the gardener the following year.
Thalassa Cruso
#31. I think one of my very favorite films of all time was with Peter Sellers when he played Chauncey, the gardener. Being There.
Blythe Danner
#32. The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.
Joyce Carol Oates
#33. The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
John Irving
#34. The gardener plants trees, not one berry of which he will ever see: and shall not a public man plant laws, institutions, government, in short, under the same conditions?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#35. The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.
George Balanchine
#36. Cotton says, "If God be the gardener, who shall pluck up what he sets down?" Hear that, Indians? No weeding of the white people allowed. Unless they're Catholic. Or one of those Satan-worshipping Virginians.
Sarah Vowell
#37. Then there are those who plant. they endure storms and all the many vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But, unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener's constant attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.
Paulo Coelho
#38. My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.
Brian Eno
#39. The gardener knows how to turn garbage into compost. Therefore our anger, sadness, and fear is the best compost for our compassion.
Kayla Mueller
#40. Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#41. If you don't look like Rupert Graves or Hugh Grant, they'll have you playing the gardener.
Jared Harris
#42. The gardener's work is never at at end; it begins with the year, and continues to the next: he prepares the ground, and then he sows it; after that he plants, and then he gathers the fruits ...
John Evelyn
#43. Be the gardener of love and joy,
Happiness will bloom in your garden.
Debasish Mridha
#44. He strove to shelter her, as a fair exotic is sheltered by the gardener, from every rougher wind, and to surround her with all that could tend to excite pleasurable emotion in her soft and benevolent mind.
Mary Shelley
#46. The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#47. Words themselves become beings, sentences becomenatural vegetation to be guided by the gardener's hands.
Eric Sevareid
#48. Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds?
Bill Vaughan
#49. By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course.
Henry Mitchell
#50. It's that which is between the gardener and his bit of soil that makes a garden.
Robin Hobb
#51. The gardener's rule applies to youth and age: When young 'sow wild oats'; but when old, grow sage.
Henry James Byron
#52. Be the gardener of gratitude to grow flowers of happiness in your garden.
Debasish Mridha
#53. We should bear the intelligence and taste of the architect or the gardener in how we shape the becoming of our self. Too much precision ("stringency") is simply misplaced, a formalism inappropriate to the kind of matter we have to deal with (and to be).
Kenny Smith
#54. Of all human activities, apart from the procreation of children, gardening is the most optimistic and hopeful. The gardener is by definition one who plans for and believes and trusts in a future, whether in the short or the longer term.
Susan Hill
#55. It is only to the gardener that time is a friend, giving each year more than he steals.
Beverley Nichols
#57. But he [the gardener] works in a fourth dimension as well: time.
Sarah Rose
#58. 'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.
John Burnside
#59. You are the gardener of your own being, the seed of your destiny. - THE FINDHORN COMMUNITY
Cindy Trimm
#60. A wise man in China asked his gardener to plant a shrub. The gardener objected that it only flowered once in a hundred years. "In that case," said the wise man, "plant it immediately." [On the importance of fundamental research.]
John Charles Polanyi
#61. Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.
C.S. Lewis
#62. She pushed the gardener away and called for them. In her sleep she had seen love. It was poisoning. It was possessing. Devouring. Or it was seven pairs of boots climbing up the stairs to find her.
Francesca Lia Block
#63. Silly gardeners! We buy pretty, comfortable benches and position them oh so carefully. But does the gardener ever sit? No! We perch momentarily and then jump up to do that next thing we see.
Janet Macunovich
#64. A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, some for a long time, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future.
W.S. Merwin
#65. Pride and resentment are not indigenous to the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive.
Hope Mirrlees
#66. All knitterly creation stems from one simple element: yarn. It is the baker's flour, the jeweler's gold, the gardener's soil. Yarn is creation, consolation, and chaos all spun together into one perfect ball.
Clara Parkes
#67. Unless the Gardener was visiting you, darkness in the Garden was the closest we got to truth.
Dot Hutchison
#68. I am very glad to hear that the Gardener has saved so much of the St. foin seed, and that of the India Hemp. Make the most you can of both, by sowing them again in drills ... Let the ground be well prepared, and the Seed (St. loin) be sown in April. The Hemp may be sown any where.
George Washington
#69. The Gardener does not create the Garden. The Garden creates the Gardener.
Alan Chadwick
#70. The gardener gives us roses, not gardeners.
Harry Hooton
#71. should I respect the work of the creator, of the gardener, or should I accept the survival instinct with which nature endowed this plant, which I now call a 'weed'?
Paulo Coelho
#72. Foolish wise folk sneer at you; foolish wise folk would pull up the useless lilies, the needless roses, from the garden, would plant in their places only serviceable wholesome cabbage. But the Gardener knowing better, plants the silly short-lived flowers; foolish wise folk, asking for what purpose.
Jerome K. Jerome
#73. I rarely wear clothes when I'm home by myself. I love making breakfast naked. But you've got to make sure the gardener's not coming that day.
Kristen Bell
#74. As is the garden such is the gardener. A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds.
Francis Bacon
#75. In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener.
Robert Rodale
#76. Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that (even as his pain increases with each loss) he comprehends - truly knows - that where there was a garden once, it can be again, or where there never was, there yet can be a garden.
Henry Mitchell
#77. Be a Gardener. Dig a ditch. Toil and sweat. And turn the earth upside down. And seek the deepness. And water plants in time. Continue this labor. And make sweet floods to run, and noble and abundant fruits to spring. Take this food and drink, and carry it to God as your true worship.
Julian Of Norwich
#78. However small your garden, you must provide for two of the serious gardener's necessities, a tool shed and a compost heap. A wire bin takes up negligible space and can be concealed by shrubs, or you can make a small pit into which you sweep leaves and clippings, but try not to fall into it.
Ann Scott
#79. In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture - it won't accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy' time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.
Jamaica Kincaid
#80. When you assess your own life, consider it with the eye of a gardener. Underneath the surface lies rich, fertile soil waiting to nurture the seeds you sow. Even more than you can imagine will grow there if given a chance.
Steve Goodier
#81. He is also a keen cook, gardener and birder. He has no middle fingers on one hand, so he can't swear but is permanently doing the heavy metal sign.
Alan Partridge
#82. That gate," said the under-gardener, turning with great deliberation towards the south, and embracing the whole of that part of England with one comprehensive sweep of his arm. "Curious,
Wilkie Collins
#83. Always try to grow in your garden some plant or plants out of the ordinary, something your neighbors never attempted. For you can receive no greater flattery than to have a gardener of equal intelligence stand before your plant and ask, "What is that?"
Richardson Wright
#84. My main ambition as a gardener is to water my orange trees with gin, then all I have to do is squeeze the juice into a glass.
W.C. Fields
#85. Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians-they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker.
Charles De Lint
#86. I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.
Terry Pratchett
#87. Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa reveals the upheaval of partition through the eyes of a child, "Lame Lenny," a young Parsi girl crippled from polio. Lenny's world is her beloved and beautiful Hindu ayah and her ayah's many Muslim admirers, the cook Imam Din, and the Untouchable gardener.
Nancy Pearl
#88. Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape,
Alison Gopnik
#89. If you have the soul of a gardener, not for anything would you work with gloves on.
Ruth Stout
#90. I very much consider the Internet a garden, and I'm a gardener, and I plant things in it and I work within the framework of the soil, the seasons, the climate, and the temperature, to produce plants.
Mark Pesce
#91. My agent tells me I am drawing the largest salary ever paid in the halls of England. Wonderful, isn't it? for a quiet, rural gardener like myself.
Lillie Langtry
#92. Weeds and wheat cannot grow peacefully together. Any gardener could tell you the same thing.
Joanne Harris
#93. I am a gardener
I plant hearts
I have no other knowledge
No language now
Close the language door and
open the heart portal
Where everything connects as ONE.
Gabriel Iqbal
#94. Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
Bill Bryson
#95. His newborn faith had suffered with no one to water the sprouting seeds, and he would be hard pressed to find such a gardener in the weed-choked kingdom of
Mizgalia.
Nicole Sager
#96. He's an avant-gardener whose great work includes the famous minimalist garden at Kew which was just a daisy and three wittily arranged grass stems.
Ben Moor
#97. In every gardener there is a child who believes in The Seed Fairy.
Robert Breault
#98. You don't have to be the greatest gardener in the world to make a difference--You just need a gnome.
Donna Hamill
#99. The successful truck gardener can never go out to dinner in the summer or spend a week end away, because his conscience tells him he has to be at home eating up his corn or packaging his beans for the freezer.
Phyllis McGinley
#100. There are several ways to lay out a little garden; the best way is to get a gardener.
Karel Capek
