quote night

In puffs of balm the night air blows

The perfume which the day foregoes,

And on the pure horizon far,

See, pulsing with the firstborn star.

- Matthew Arnold, from The Liquid Sky

Plant and Pest Hotline, may I help you?

"Why did your plant die?

You walked too close, you trod on it,

You dropped a piece of sod on it.

You hoed it down, you weeded it.

You planted it the wrong way up,

you grew it in a yogurt cup.

But you forgot to make the hole;

The soggy compost took its toll.

September storm, November drought.

It heaved in March, the roots popped out.

You watered it with herbicide.

You scattered bonemeal fr and wide.

You walked too close, you trod on it.

You dropped a piece of sod on it."

- David Godine, from A Gardener Obsessed

quote sun

"The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields

and the waters shout to him golden shouts."

George Meredith

quote Nature

"Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

quote grace

A cloudless sky; a world of heather,

Purple foxglove; yellow of broom;

We two among it, wading together;

Shaking out honey, treading perfume

- Jean Ingelow

quote education

"I learned about gardening soon after I learned to walk. Tagging after my grandpa with my little watering can, I sprinkled where he hosed, jabbed at the earth with my toy shovel where he cultivated the soil, peered at the flowers that he examined."
- Ruth Shaw Ernst

quote daisies

"Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,
The constellated flowers that never set."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

quote

"... a refuge, a place of quiet contemplation, a source of nourishment for mind and body alike."
- Dean Pallier

Oh velvet bee, you're a dusty fellow;

You've powdered your legs with gold!

O brave marshmary buds, rich and yellow;

Give me your money to hold!

- Jean Ingelow

"What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?" the Gnat inquired.

"I don't rejoice in insects at all," Alice explained..."

- Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking Glass

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethern, they are not other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

- Henry Beston, from The Outhermost House

"... a place as favorable to plant and animal life as it is pleasing to the human eye ... and nose, for the myriad of sweet scents; and ear, for the chatter of bird; and mouth, for the harvest-fresh flavors of berries and vegetables; and hands, for the velvety feel of the petals of pansy or wild poppy."

"The columbines, stone blue, or deep night brown,
Their honeycomb like blossoms hanging down;
Each cottage garden's fond adopted child,
Though heaths still claim them,
where they grow yet wild."
- John Clare

And I serve the fairy Queen,

To dew her orbs upon the green;

The cowslips tall her pensioners be;

In their gold coats spots you see.

- Wiliam Shakespeare, from Fairy Song

"Lovliest of lovely things are they,

On earth that soonest pass away,

The rose that lives its little hour

Is prized beyond the sculptured flower."

- William Cullen Bryant

"All things that love the sun are out of doors;

The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;

The grass is bright with raindrops; on the moors

The hare is running races in her mirth"

- William Wordsworth

quote grass

"My earliest love of flowers, how good
To lay my sunburnt face,
In grass so lush,
It shames the name of green..."
- Alfred Hayes

"All day I hoe weeds

All night I sleep

All night I hoe again

In dreams the weeds of the day."

Anon, translated from Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth

"If you tickle the earth with a hoe, she laughs with a harvest."

- Douglas Jerrold

"When in these fresh mornings I go into my garden before anyone is awake, I go for the time being into perfect happiness. In this hour divinely fresh and still, the fair face of every flower salutes me with a silent joy that fills me with infinite content; each each gives me its color, its grace, its perfume, and enriches me with the consummation of its beauty."
- Celia Thaxter