Here march the eaters of earth, the swallowers of rain.

One of the maxims of the new field of conservation biological control is that to control insect herbivores, you must maintain populations of insect herbivores.

We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich...

We gardeners are healthy, joyous, natural creatures. We are practical, patient, optimistic. We declare our optimism every year, every season, with every act of planting.

Doesn’t matter what you do, or how you do it, your neighbors are gonna talk about you ANYWAY.

Water will, increasingly, be detained, stored and then recycled or infiltrated in gardens.

Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to...

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...

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing...

I was gardening when I saw this snail/slug thing disguised as a leaf. Ah, isn’t fall a wonderful time to slowly fall in love?

When Isaiah predicted that spears would become pruning hooks, that’s a reference to cultivating. Pruning and trimming and growing and paying close attention to the plants and whether they’re getting enough water and if their...

May I a small house and large garden have;And a few friends,And many books, both true.

Yellow flowers are like physical manifestations of sunlight. I’m growing a garden of sunglasses just to help save eyesight and make the world a little bit cooler.

Where have all the flowers of old Singapore gone? Gone, one would imagine, with the old folks and homes

She was a gardener of the ruthless type, and went for any small green thing that incautiously showed a timid spike above the earth, suspecting it of being a weed. She had had a slight...

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature’s uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid...

It is easier to tell a person what life is not, rather than to tell them what it is. A child understands weeds that grow from lack of attention, in a garden. However, it is...

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...

Planting a flower’s like opening a book, because either way you’re starting something. And your garden’s your library.

Garden design is all about concealment and surprise.

As an angler and a gardener, I cherish each drop of rain that falls.

By bringing a soulful consciousness to gardening sacred space can be created outdoors.

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

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...

When tended the right way, beauty multiplies.

When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.

If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. ‘Green fingers’ are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are...

There is a tale…It tells of the days when a blight hung over our land. Nothing prospered. Nothing flourished. Not even zucchini would grow.

It always amazes me to look at the little, wrinkled brown seeds and think of the rainbows in ’em,” said Captain Jim. “When I ponder on them seeds I don’t find it nowise hard to...

Regardless of geographical region or culture gardening is perhaps the most common and shared experience of Nature.

A weed is but an unloved flower.

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever...

A flowing flurry of flowers fell to the floor when I fell in love, as if my heart were a garden that gushed forth and flooded her being with the fragrance of romance.

Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.

Often I’ll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there’s no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the...

Everything is an art, which must be mastered.

A garden is beautiful only when it is filled with people; they determine its beauty

To-day I thinkOnly with scents, – scents dead leaves yield,And bracken, and wild carrot’s seed,And the square mustard field;Odours that riseWhen the spade wounds the root of tree,Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,Rhubarb or celery;The smoke’s...

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn’t necessarily expect to witness.

Gardening is about cheating, about persuading unlikely plants to survive in unlikely places and when that trick is well accomplished the results can be highly satisfying.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood...

Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.

Dandelions, like all things in nature are beautiful when you take the time to pay attention to them.

I’ll have to remember you think that way,” Nathan said.

He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep...

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.

The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize...

She was a woman with a broom or a dust-pan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You sawher cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or yousaw her setting out...

But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you’re left with, at the end of the day,...

No one plants rosebushes for the thorns.