If you conducted a random survey among Gen Z and millennials on the significance of gardening, you’d realize that most members of these demographic cohorts do not hold gardening (and by extension farming) in such a high esteem. To them, farming is nothing more than getting your hands dirty and waiting forever to reap the rewards of your hard labor.
But frankly speaking, millennials and Gen Z cannot be blamed for their distorted perception of gardening. For a generation that has largely grown up in urban centers and continually experimented with the finest of technological inventions, it’s difficult to view gardening in a positive light.
However, the past few years have witnessed a massive paradigm shift in how people view agriculture worldwide, and gardening quotes have played a crucial role in changing those perspectives.
Inspiring Garden Quotes
Here’s a definitive collection of the 80 most inspiring gardening quotes ever.
1. A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it ~ Dogen
2. A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust ~ Gertrude Jekyll
3. A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself ~ May Sarton
4. A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them ~ Liberty Hyde Bailey
5. A good garden may have some weeds ~ Thomas Fuller
6. A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule ~ Michael Pollan
7. A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit ~ D. Elton Trueblood
8. A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. – Greek proverb
9. A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows ~ Doug Larson
10. A weed is but an unloved flower ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox
11. All gardeners know better than other gardeners ~ Chinese proverb
12. Almost every person, from childhood, has been touched by the untamed beauty of wildflowers ~ Lady Bird Johnson
13. An optimistic gardener is one who believes that whatever goes down must come up ~ Leslie Hall
14. Anybody who wants to rule the world should try to rule a garden first ~ Anonymous
15. Creating your own urban farm is as simple as planting your flowerbeds with edibles ~ Greg Peterson
16. Despite the gardener’s best intentions, Nature will improvise ~ Michael P. Garofalo
17. Don’t wear perfume in the garden — unless you want to be pollinated by bees ~ Anne Raver
18. Earth laughs in flowers ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
19. Essential advice for the gardener: grow peas of mind, lettuce be thankful, squash selfishness, turnip to help thy neighbor, and always make thyme for loved ones ~ Anonymous
20. 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 ~ May Sarton
21. Farming is a profession of hope ~ Brian Brett
22. Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul ~ Luther Burbank
23. Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts ~ Sigmund Freud
24. Garden as though you will live forever ~ William Kent
25. Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years. – Anonymous
26. Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity ~ Lindley Karstens
27. Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes ~ Anonymous
28. Gardening is not a rational act ~ Margaret Atwood
29. Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized ~ Allan Armitage
30. Gardens are a form of autobiography ~ Sydney Eddison
31. Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade ~ Rudyard Kipling
32. God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done ~ Anonymous
33. Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination ~ Mrs. C.W. Earle
34. Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers ~ May Sarton
35. I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow ~ David Hobson
36. I know the pleasure of pulling up root vegetables. They are solvable mysteries ~ Novella Carpenter
37. I like gardening — it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself ~ Alice Sebold
38. If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
39. If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere ~ Vincent van Gogh
40. If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden ~ Robert Breault
41. In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it ~ Frank McKinney Hubbard
42. It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought ~ James Douglas
43. It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn ~ B.C. Forbes
44. It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth, to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season ~ Kate Morton
45. It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees ~ George Eliot
46. Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead ~ Oscar Wilde
47. Life begins the day you start a garden ~ Chinese Proverb
48. Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air ~ Georges Bernanos
49. Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same ~ Helen Keller
50. Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there ~ Thomas Fuller
51. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden ~ Thomas Jefferson
52. One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today ~ Dale Carnegie
53. Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
54. Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
55. Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are ~ Alfred Austin
56. Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
57. The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous ~ Rabindranath Tagore
58. The garden is the poor man’s apothecary ~ German Proverb
59. The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway ~ Michael Pollan
60. The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul ~ Alfred Austin
61. The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land ~ Abraham Lincoln
62. The hum of bees is the voice of the garden ~ Elizabeth Lawrence
63. The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives ~ Gertrude Jekyll
64. The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies ~ Gertrude Jekyll
65. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world ~ Michael Pollan
66. There are always flowers for those who want to see them ~ Henri Matisse
67. There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments ~ Janet Kilburn Phillips
68. There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace ~ Aldo Leopold
69. There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder ~ Alfred Austin
70. There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp ~ John Steinbeck
71. Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God ~ Thomas Jefferson
72. To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves ~ Mahatma Gandhi
73. To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow ~ Audrey Hepburn
74. Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow ~ Zora Neale Hurston
75. We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses ~ Abraham Lincoln
76. Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans ~ Marcelene Cox
77. Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them ~ A.A. Milne
78. What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
79. When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden ~ Minnie Aumonier
80. When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment ~ Georgia O’Keefe
Conclusion
If you’ve always desired to start a garden but didn’t have enough motivation to take the plunge, we hope the above collection of gardening quotes will help you dig in.
And if you feel there’s a cool gardening quote we should add to this amazing list, let us know in the comments section below.