The Quotable Garden: Writings That Grab the Heart

Reading can be a slow plod, but a phrase that grabs the heart makes it better than love, chocolate, and gardening. Here are quotations from books that have deeply resonated with me as a gardener and philosopher—because profound thoughts have roots in the landscape.

“There’s something very important to me about having a kind of relationship, with plants and animals, that can be transacted wholly without language. The warmth of one’s body is a form of communication. The stroke of one’s hand is a means of communication. In the garden those forms are heightened. I have a tendency when I’m walking in the garden to brush the flowers as I go by, anticipating the fragrant eloquence of their response. I get a sense of reciprocity that is very comforting, consoling.”

Touching plants stimulates growth; babies’ growth depends on touch. How amazing that reaching out resonates so deeply.

“Gardening, as compared to lawn care, tutors us in nature’s ways, fostering an ethic of give-and-take with respect to the land. Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place … For if lawn mowing feels like copying the same sentence over and over, gardening is like writing out new ones, an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery. Gardens also teach the necessary if un-American lesson that nature and culture can be compromised, that there might be some middle ground between the lawn and the forest … The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.”

Every bloom, butterfly, bird, raindrop is a new sentence in the garden—hope and daring. Between nature and our inner selves is a middle ground: the garden.

“One’s sense of one’s self as the center of one’s life, all life, dominates and we forget that, despite the striving, anguish, limitless sensations and desires, we will become the earth itself. A life feels so large and sprawly, so magnetic — it attracts people and objects to it — and when all is said and done, despite the flares of helplessness or angst, it feels sufficiently controlled: it is impossible to imagine ourselves reduced, anonymous, disconnected.”

If you garden, how can you feel alone or helpless? The garden reminds us we are soil and light, connected—great joy and comfort. We share genes with plants.

“The earth and our own bodies, by casting shadows, seem to be the opposite of light. But if you have gazed up through the leaves of a tree at the sky, if you have watched the jeweled crests of waves, or held a shimmering fish in your hand, or lifted your palm against the sun and seen ruby light blazing through the flesh of your squeezed fingers, you know that matter is filled with fire. Matter IS fire, in slow motion … The resistant stuff we touch and walk on and eat, the resistant stuff we are, blood and bone, is not the opposite of light but light’s incarnation.”

All matter created in supernovae—we are stardust. Sun’s light grows plants that nourish us physically and psychologically. Why not have a garden?

“The essential thing is not so much that children should grow up (although they must), as that grown-ups should not lose altogether the innocent sensual pleasures that we knew at our beginning. We should be able to find our way back to the bright discovery days of the world as it was perceived and known in childhood, when every day brought new things to experience and learn … There is nothing like a garden to stimulate and satisfy each and all of our senses.”

The answer to every question in life is surely in the garden. Every consolation, encouragement, dream is out there—if we let go of our desire for answers.

“To tip a weed from the earth is satisfying. There is a pale, crackling sound heard in the head and felt in the hand as the tenderest root fibers break from their holdfasts; then a bright, cheery crunch as the clump itself gives way. I like the weightiness of the clump; I like the way the weight lightens as the soil, shaken out, beaten out, spatters its sustenance back to the ground. There is a fine sensation of murder.”

Weed pulling is as satisfying as scratching a hard-to-reach itch.

“Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.”