All Quotations

If you want to read all the gardening quotations that I’ve collected, this is where you can do it.

Who has the upper hand

~Penelope Lively in Life in the Garden, p. 5

There is always this sense that the garden is a living entity, with its own agenda–hundreds of conflicting agendas–and that you are in control only up to a point, a precarious relationship in which it is not clear who has the upper hand.

Weeds grow with intent

~Penelope Lively in Life in the Garden, p. 5

Weeds don’t just grow, they grow with intent, they grow aggressively. Well, they do, as any gardener knows. They sneak in and swarm up when your back is turned.

We garden for tomorrow

~Penelope Lively in Life in the Garden, p. 4

We garden for tomorrow, and thereafter. We garden in expectation, and that is why it is so invigorating. Gardening, you are no longer stuck in the here and now; you think backward, and forward, you think of how this or that performed last year, you work out your hopes and plans for the next.

Forget Design

~James Fenton in A Garden From A Hundred Packets of Seed, p. 56

Forget design for a moment. Design has beomce a terrible, stupid, and expensive tyrant. The emphasis here is all on content. Such a flower garden should have the same beauty as an allotment. It says: This is what I felt like having this year.

Plants that hop around

~James Fenton in A Garden From A Hundred Packets of Seed, p. 31

All but the tidiest, most obsessively controlling of gardeners look forward to those plants that hop around. At first they are placed near the front of the border. Next they find their way out onto the path, into the gravel or the cracks in the paving. And the first time this happens one thinks: Now my garden is beginning to show that extra panache–this is maturity in miniature, and these will be my signature plants.

Not so much a plan as a craze

~James Fenton in A Garden From A Hundred Packets of Seed, pp. 75-76

What really gets a regular garden going is not so much a plan as a craze, or a series of overlapping crazes. And when we are in the grips of the craze, we want to know everything therei is to be known about a plant–how it appears in every variant, what can be done with it, what will make it happy. When the craze subsides, it may be that we can begin to think the unthinkable: to admit, for instance, that we are going to have to live without azaleas, or cut down on our hydrangea habit. . .

Postcards sent on a long voyage

~Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck in A Year at North Hill, p.22

And though one has begun to search for signs of spring almost since January, and to receive them, like postcards sent on a long voyage to home, it is with the greening of the grass that spring has, finally, certainly arrived.