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.

After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis,...

Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: ‘For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.’ … he…...

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens — a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree — the act of leaving parts...

A gardin is where you can find a whole spectrum of life, birth and death