Cottage Quotes: Gardening

by Heidi Burke

The sense of accomplishment and connection to nature one receives from planting a garden are undeniable. Great minds throughout the ages have expounded on the delights of earth and sun and growing things.

Looking for inspiration?

Gardening and nature quotes.

"The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies."
~ Gertrude Jekyll

"The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land."
~ Abraham Lincoln

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
~ Charles Baudelaire

"It was home; her roof, her garden, her green acres, her dear trees; it was shelter for the little family at Sunnybrook."
~ Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

"Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners."
~ William Shakespeare

"Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places."
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

"To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves."
~ Mahatma Gandhi

"If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?"
~ G.K. Chesterton

"Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade."
~ Rudyard Kipling

"A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul."
~ Saadi

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
~ Jesus of Nazareth

"In the right frame of mind, to walk from one room in a house to another can be exploration of the highest order. To a child a back garden can be an unknown country."
~ Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

"It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!"
~ Huck Finn in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Detective

"A house though otherwise beautiful, yet if it hath no garden belonging to it, is more like a prison than a house."
~ William Coles

"All my hurts my garden spade can heal."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All art is but imitation of nature."
~ Seneca the Younger

"Spring drew on . . . and a greenness grew over those brown beds which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps."
~ Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing."
~ Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

"I love my garden, and I love working in it. To potter with green growing things, watching each day to see the dear, new sprouts come up, is like taking a hand in creation, I think. Just now my garden is like faith - the substance of things hoped for."
~ Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

"Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat."
~ Laura Ingalls Wilder