279 Quotes About Gardening

My greens are so green, even John Green would go green.

It is snowing. The flakes stream into the torchlight like a crowd flowing across a bridge, each one unknowably different, all exactly the same. But look up and the snow piles out of the dark like a weightless waterfall, tumbling from a black nowhere to your face. Snow at night is like the roof falling in, quietly.

I have always thought of urban gardens - most gardens - as islands, where we create our own kingdoms, acting out our need for land, nurture and nature. On this weekend all these tiny islands wake again, each one crammed with insects, birdsong (often far better in town than country) and slow-moving people emerging into this gift of extra light.

It is not hard to start a small garden, all you need is a sapling, a planting pot, a small bag of soil, and regular watering. There you go, you helped cooling the earth down by one plant.

Growing happens most when things are young.

There is nothing more precarious than an environment whose smallest inhabitants have been completely removed.

much of the peat sold in garden centres is now imported from other countries, notably from Ireland, Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Estonia is a wild and unspoiled country where bears and wolves still roam, and it is sad to reflect that great chunks of it are now being dug up so that we can grow begonias.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

London is my most compelling lover; I am hooked on it, for all its mistreatment. Expensive and demanding and, if you know where to look, beautiful.