A. J. Dezallier D'Argenville “A fine garden being no less difficult to contrive and order well than a good building. ”

Albert Richards “A beautiful blossom is a fleeting thing It stays for a moment and then takes wing: With special rays we catch it ere flight So all may enjoy the beautiful sight. ”

Alfred Austin “The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. Share the botanical bliss of gardeners through the ages, who have cultivated philosophies to apply to their own ? and our own ? lives: Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are. ”

Alfred Bunn “The heart bowed down by weight of woe To weakest hope will cling. ”

Algernon Charles Swinburne “Though one were fair as roses His beauty clouds and closes. ”

Allen Lacey “Giving names to things is a way of knowing them and of seeing them as well. Knowledge deals importantly in names, and naming requires the sort of vision that discerns that these two objects are of the same kind and those other two are not. ”

Allen Lacy “An angel, legend has it, took pity on a little shepherd girl who had nothing to give to the Infant Jesus in his manger. The angel handed her a weed, but first transformed it into this beautiful flower of winter. ”

Andrew Marvell “Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green glade ... Such was that happy garden-state, ... ”

Anne Raver “To me, the garden is a doorway to other worlds; one of them, of course, is the world of birds. The garden is their dinner table, bursting with bugs and worms and succulent berries. ”

Annie Spiegelman “In my next life I want to come back as one of my cats. They basically pretend we don't exist. They sit like two bumps on a log and watch us work for hours in the yard. They're probably wondering, along with the entire neighborhood, why we work so hard in our garden and it still looks like hell. ”

Benjamin Disraeli “How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence. ”

Beverly Nichols “A garden without cats, it will be generally agreed, can scarcely deserve to be called a garden at all. ”

Canon Ellacombe “The fair-weather gardener, who will do nothing except when wind and weather and everything else are favourable, is never a master of his craft. Gardening, above all other crafts, is a matter of faith, grounded, however (if on nothing better), on his experience that somehow or other seasons go on in their right course, and bring their right results. No doubt bad seasons are a trial of his faith; it is grievous to lose the fruits of much labour by a frosty winter or a droughty summer, but, after all, frost and drought are necessities for which, in all his calculations, he must leave an ample margin; but even in the extreme cases, when the margin is past, the gardener's occupation is not gone. ”

Carol Williams “Usually children spend more time in the garden than anybody else. It is where they learn about the world, because they can be in it unsupervised, yet protected. Some gardeners will remember from their own earliest recollections that no one sees the garden as vividly, or cares about it as passionately, as the child who grows up in it. ”

Catherine M. Prostak “God in his wisdom created these places And made them accessible to those of all races Rare visions of beauty, and fragrant perfume Distributed freely for all to consume. While Enjoying Nature, confessions and pardons Sincerely flow forth, as love grows in God's Gardens ”

Cecil Roberts “To a gardener there is nothing more exasperating than a hose that just isn't long enough. ”

Celia Thaxter “I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love and respond to it as they do to nothing else. ”

Charles Dudley Warner “The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him, as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there. ”

Charles Robert Darwin “And hail their queen, fair regent of the night. ”

Christian Nestell Bovée “To cultivate a garden is to walk with God. ”