To live is so startling it leaves
little time for anything else.
- Emily Dickinson
Gardeners , like everyone else, live
second by second and minute
by minute. What we see at one particular moment is then and
there before us. But there is a second way of seeing. Seeing
with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up
days and seasons past and years gone by.
- Allen Lacy, The Gardener's Eye, 1992, p. 16
Spring passes and one remembers one's
innocence
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.
- Yoko Ono, Season of Glass
To these delights of a garden, age may add a
further interest which can hardly be distinguished from beauty, for the mind, at least
with those who have the historic instinct, is always longing to be connected with the
past, and dreading for itself confinement upon the plane of time, delights in evidences of
the long continuance of nations, families and institutions, in hale and vigorous old age,
in long-settled peace beyond the turn of Fortune's wheel, the 'scornful dominion of
accident.' Restfulness is the prevailing note of an old garden; in this fairy world
of echo and suggestion where the Present Age never comes but to commune with the Past, we
feel the glamour of a Golden Age, of a state of society just and secure which has grown
and blossomed as the rose.
- Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909
Life is the blossoming of flowers in the spring,
the ripening of fruit in the fall,
the rhythm of the earth and of nature.
Life is the cry of cicadas signaling the end of summer,
migratory birds winging south in a transparent autumn sky,
fish frolicking in a stream.
Life is the joy beautiful music instills in us,
the thrilling sight of a mountain peak reddened by the rising sun,
the myriad combinations and permutations of visible and invisible phenomena.
Life is all things.
-
In a Burmese Garden
Under an ancient Buddha's Gaze-
white hibiscus
a blaze of bougainvillea
and majestic moths play.
The geckos are calling
above teak slats of the
monastery
and banana trees wave
their giant sleeves
in the hot wind
I have my fill
to stand with them-
my tall friends in the garden,
to praise the last ember of sunset
while the rats run free
and the stars cavort
in the skies
beyond Your laughing eyes.
Ayya Medhanandi (From
"Tomorrow's Moon," 2005 Aruna publications)
Good friends and excellent teachers—Stick close to them!
Wealth and power are fleeting dreams
But wise words perfume the world for ages.
Ryokan
Because we don't think about future
generations,
they will never forget us.
- Henrik Tikkanen
Those who contemplate the beauty of
the earth find reserves of
strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something
infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature— the assurance
that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
- Rachel Carson
Winter - Quotes and Poems for Gardeners
For eternally and always there is
only one now,
one and the same now; the present is the only
thing that has no end.
- Erwin Schrodinger
... time is not a linear flow, as we
think it is, into past, present, and
future. Time is an indivisible whole, a great pool in which all events
are eternally embodied and still have their meaningful flash of
supernormal or extra-sensory perception, and glimpse of something
that happened long ago in our linear time.
- Frank Waters, Mountain Dialogues, 1981
Half our time is spent trying to find
something to do
with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
- Will Rogers
Men talk of killing time, while time
quietly kills them.
- Dion Boucicault
So many years in one
yesterday.
- Carla Phelps Wert
Home and Gardens: Our Sense of Place
This is June, the month of grass and leaves . . . already the aspens
are trembling again,
and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered
in my thoughts, as if I might be too
late. Each season is but an infinitesimal
point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has
no duration. It simply gives a
tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomena is
reminiscence and prompting.
Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution
of the seasons, as two
cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one
point of contact
at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly
pass to a
new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and
number
of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am
ice,
now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind.
-
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1857
"The past is a guidepost, not a
hitching post."
- Thomas Holcroft
Suddenly, as rare things will,
it vanished.
-Elizabeth Barret Browning
Tis an old dial with many a stain;
In summer crowned with drifting orchard bloom,
Tricked in the autumn with the yellow rain,
And white in winter like a marble tomb.
And round about its gray, time-eaten brow
Lean letters speak - a worn and shattered row:
I am a Shade: A Shadowe too arte thou:
I marke the Time: saye, Gossip, dost thou soe?
- Austin Dobson, The Sundial, 1900
A new home by a gap in the Meng wall;
Of the old trees, a few gnarled willows are left.
Those who come in the future, who will they be,
Grieving in vain for what others had before?
- Wang Wei (701-761 AD)
Winter is an etching, spring a
watercolor, summer an oil painting
and autumn a mosaic of them all.
- Stanley Horowitz
This grand show is eternal. It
is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal
dawn and glowing, on sea and continues and islands, each
in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
- John Muir
Life is not lost by dying; life is
lost minute by minute,
day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
- Stephen Vincent Benet
When Time who steals our years away
Shall steal our pleasures too,
The mem'ry of the past will stay,
And half our joys renew.
- Thomas Moore, 1779-1852
Only the ephemeral is of lasting
value.
- Ionesco
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
- Gandhi
Then sleep the seasons, full of might;
While slowly swells the pod,
And rounds the peach, and in the night
The mushroom bursts the sod.
The winter comes: the frozen rut
Is bound with silver bars;
the white drift heaps against the hut;
and night is pierced with stars.
- Coventry
Patmore, 1823-1896, The Seasons
To see what is in front of one's nose
needs a constant struggle.
- George Orwell
|
Seasonal and
Gardening
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| January | April | July | October |
| February | May | August | November |
| March | June | September | December |
Forty is about the age for unexpected
developments: extroverts turn introspective,
introverts become sociable, and everyone, without regard to type, acquires
grey hairs and philosophies of life. Many also acquire gardens.
- Janice Emily Bowers, A Full Life in a Small Place, 1993
The day is of infinite length for him
who knows
how to appreciate and use it.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The bad news is time flies.
The good news is you're the pilot.
- Michael Althsuler
Leisure - Quotes for Gardeners
Experiencing the present purely is
being empty and hollow;
you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
- Annie Dillard
One today is worth two tomorrows.
- Benjamin Franklin
But because truly being here
is so much; because everything
here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 9th, 1923
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
To the attentive eye, each movement
of the year has
it's own beauty, and in the fame field it beholds, every
hour, a picture which was never seen before
and which shall never be seen again.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let it be forgotten,
as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten forever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
- Sara Teasdale, Let it Be Forgotten
Between two moments, bliss is ripe.
Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night.
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
- William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
The past is solid, the future is
liquid.
- J.L. Aubert
All my possessions for a moment of
time.
- Queen Elizabeth I
Another reason you "can't take it with you" - it goes before you do.
It is like clouds rising in the sky:
suddenly there, gone without a trace.
And it is like drawing a pattern on water: it is neither born nor passes away.
This is cosmic peace and eternal rest.
When it is enclosed, it is called the matrix of the realization of suchness;
When it emerges from the enclosure, it is called the cosmic body of reality.
- Ma-tsu
The gardening season officially
begins on January 1st and ends on December 31.
- Marie Huston
No sooner did I bend over and scratch the
soil with the hoe that I began to unearth
bits and pieces ... of my past. Memories forever rooted in time were clustered
in
my garden consciousness like potatoes, waiting, crying to be dug up. ...
I plant flowers and vegetables. I harvest memories - and life.
- Nancy H. Jordan, 1993
As lousy as things are now, tomorrow
they will be
somebody's good old days.
- Gerald Barzan
We never remember days,
only moments.
- Cesare Pavese
The gardener's rule applies to youth
and age:
When young 'sow wild oats'; but when old, grow sage.
- H.J. Byron
A garden should be in a constant
state of fluid
change, expansion, experiment, adventure;
above all it should be an inquisitive, loving,
but self-critical journey on the part of its owner.
- H. E. Bates
Patience is a flower that does not
grow in everyone's garden.
- English proverb
We can hold back neither the coming
of the flowers
nor the downward rush of the stream; sooner or later,
everything comes to its fruition.
- Loy Ching-Yuen
The plants arrive,
usually on a day that is either raining or requires one's
presence elsewhere, work perhaps. Plant orders do not arrive on sunny,
warm Saturday mornings.
- Steve Hatch
When one has a great deal to put into
it
a day has a hundred pockets.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All to Human
The day is conscious of itself.
- Rumi
So little time, so little to do.
- Oscar Levant
Four seasons fill the
measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of men.
- John Keats
To create a garden is to search for a
better world.
In our effort to improve on nature, we are guided
by a vision of paradise. Whether the result is a
horticultural masterpiece or only a modest
vegetable patch, it is based on the expectation
of a glorious future. This hope for the future
is at the heart of all gardening.
- Marina Schinz
The future is like the daytime moon,
a diffident but faithful companion,
so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.
- Robert Grudin
When the time is ripe for certain
things, these things
appear in different places in the manner of violets
coming to light in the early spring.
- Farkas Bolyai
It's not over until it's over.
-Yogi Berra
To be interested in the changing
seasons is a happier state
of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
- George Santayana
I have seen the future and it's like
the present, only longer.
- Dan Quisenberry
As if you could kill time
without injuring eternity.
- Henery David Thoreau
The cycle of nature—the progress
from seed to fruition to dying-off
and then renewal in the spring—was mirrored in the wild fields and
the cultivated garden alike, while the fragility of harvest—the possible
interruption of the cycle by drought, wind, or other natural calamities—
established the pattern of how humans understood the workings of the
cosmos. The oldest of surviving sacred stories have their roots in the
garden and reflect how humanity sought to understand the changeable
patterns of their world and, at the same time, to imagine a world no
longer subject to change.
- Peg Streep, Gardening as a Spiritual Tool
One faces the future with one's past.
- Pearl S. Buck
You can't learn anything from saguaro
cactus, from ocotillo. They
are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy
in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know
even less than you do.
- Barry Lopez
Spring - Quotes and Poems for Gardeners
There be delights that will fetch the
day about from sun to sun
and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream ... For a
garden is Arcady brought home. It is man's bit of gaudy
make-believe - his well-disguised fiction of an unvexed Paradise...
a world where gayety knows no eclipse and winter and rough
weather are held at bay.
- John D. Sedding, Garden-Craft, 1893
Half the interest of a garden is the constant
exercise of the imagination. You are always living
three, or indeed six, months
hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never
can be really good
gardeners. To be content with the present, and not
striving about the future, is
fatal.
- Alice Morse Earle, 1897
Everywhere is here and everywhen is now.
- Dante
The purpose of art is to stop time.
- Bob Dylan
What continues to astonish me about a garden
is that you can walk
past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and
emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering
what on earth happened.
- Dorothy Gilman
Memory is the power to gather roses in winter.
We must wait until the evening to see
how splendid the day had been.
– Sophocles
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
- Andrew Marvell
Life isn't a matter of milestones but of
moments.
- Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
We do not remember days, we remember
moments.
- C. Pavese
There is a kind of immortality in
every garden.
- Gladys Taber
Eternity is the Absolute present.
- D. T. Suzuki
Eternity is in love with the
productions of time.
- William Blake
Our gardens are environments of perpetual change.
The cypress
reach their heights of glory as the fruit trees wane. The daffodils
finish their
blooms just as the liquidambar begins to bud. Pansies
and snapdragons wilt in
the same heat that brings
the roses alive. We are not dissuaded.
- Tonia Triebwasser, The Color of Grace: Thoughts From a Garden in a Dry
Land
"If" is a word that has
humbled many gardeners.
But it hasn't made us quit.
- Katherine Endicott
Brute force crushes many plants.
Yet the plants rise again.
The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.
And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and
long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion
the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor
commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning
it was not a Word, but a chirrup.
- D. H. Lawrence
It is the time you have wasted for
your rose
that makes your rose so important.
- Antoine de St. Exupery, The Little Prince
Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and
plants are a continuum and that the
wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle. One lifetime is never
enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the
imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?
- Francis H. Cabott, Chairman of The Garden Conservancy
What will remain of my legacy?
Flowers in the spring,
The hototogisu in summer,
And the crimson leaves of Autumn.
- Ryokan, 1758-1831
One Robe, One Bowl, Translated by John Stevens
Youth is like spring, an over-praised season
more
remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes.
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we
lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
- Samuel Butler
Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies - alas! how soon he dies!
- Samuel Johnson. 1709-1784, Winter. An Ode
Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly--and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
- Omar Khayyám
What is history but a fable agreed
upon?
- Napoleon Bonaparte
There is a continuity about the
garden and an order of succession
in the garden year which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense there
are no breaks or divisions - seed time flows on to flowering time
and harvest time; no sooner is one thing dying than another
is coming to life.
- Susan Hill and Rory Stuart, Reflections from a
Garden, 1995
So fades a summer cloud away;
So sinks the gale when storms are o'er;
So gently shuts the eye of day;
So dies a wave along the shore.
- Mrs. Barbauld, 1743-1825, The Death of the Virtuous
Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.
- Thich Nat Hahn
Oh, tell me how my garden grows,
Where I no more may take delight,
And if some dream of me it knows,
Who dream of it by day and night.
- Mildred Howells, 1872-1966
Spend the afternoon. You can't
take it with you.
- Annie Dillard
Slow down and everything you are
chasing
will come around and catch you.
- John De Paola
The more sand that has escaped from
the hourglass of our life,
the clearer we should see through it.
- Jean Paul Sartre
One of the most
delightful things about a garden
is the anticipation it provides.
- W. E. Johns
Summer - Quotes and Poems for Gardeners
There is nothing permanent except
change.
- Heraclitus
Some reckon time by stars,
And some by hours;
Some measure days by dreams
And some by flowers;
My heart alone records
My days and hours.
- Madison J. Cawein
When planning for a year, plant corn.
When planning for a decade, plant trees.
When planning for life, train and educate people.
- Chinese Proverb
This narrow isthmus 'twixt two
boundless seas,
The past, the future: - two eternities!
- Thomas Moore, 1779-1852, Lalla Rookh: The Veiled Prophet
of Khorassan.
Only to a magician is the world
forever fluid, infinitely mutable and
eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows
truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something
else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power.
- Peter Beagle
Prediction is very difficult,
especially about the future.
- Niels Bohr
I prefer winter and fall, when you
feel the bone structure of the
landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter.
Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show.
- Andrew Wyeth
There is still no cure for the common
birthday.
- John Glenn, U. S. Senator, at age 75
In any weather, at any hour of the
day or night, I have been anxious to improve
the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too: to stand on the meeting of two
eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment;
to toe that line.
- Henry David Thoreau
Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!
John Milton, The Hour of Death
... the spring, the summer,
The chilling autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
No single thing abides; but all
things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow
Until we know them and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.
- Lucretius
All the flowers of all the tomorrows
are in the seeds of today and yesterday.
- Chinese proverb
For after all what is man in nature?
A nothing in relation to infinity, all in
relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely
far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings
are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is
equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was
drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
- Blaise Pascal
The mills of God grind slowly but
they grind finely.
- Irish Proverb
Look well to this day. Yesterday is
but a dream and tomorrow
is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a
dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.
- Francis Gray
For four-fifths of our history, our
planet was populated by pondscum.
- J. W. Schopf
ticking my life away,
indifferent clocks
everywhere
- Mike Garofalo, Cuttings
Never do today what you can put off
till tomorrow.
- Mathew Browne
Opportunity knocks,
but the inevitable just comes on in.
Allan Harris
It is only possible to live happily
ever after on a day to day basis.
- Margaret Bonnano
Thou hast set all the borders of the
earth:
thou hast made summer and winter.
- Psalms 74:17
Tomorrow is the busiest day of the
year.
- Spanish Proverb
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around
every circle
another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a
beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When
I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
- William Shakespeare,
Sonnet XV
Some things arrive in their own
mysterious hour, on their
own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.
- Gail Goodwin
Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn's soberer time.
- Thomas Moore
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by Over 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Whatever else seems pleasant at first
apprehension, at length becomes dull by
too long acquaintance. But the pleasures of
a Garden are every day renewed.
A Garden is the only complete delight the world
affords, ever
complying with our various and mutable Minds.
- Author Unknown
It is only when you start a garden -
probably after age fifty -
that you realize something important happens every day.
- Geoffrey B. Charlesworth
Time is something everyone runs short on
and finally runs out of.
When gardening, half and hour is fifty minutes.
Time may wait for no man, but seems to muddle and poke along quite slowly for
gardeners.
Winter does not turn into Summer; ash does not turn into firewood - on the chopping block
of time.
A garden flourishes in the mind's time of last season, next season, and now.
- Mike Garofalo, Pulling Onions
Repetition is the only form of
permanence that Nature can achieve.
- George Santayana
Time is a great teacher, but
unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Hector Louis Berlioz
I never think of the future.
It comes soon enough.
- Albert Einstein
Anyone who thinks that gardening
begins in the spring and ends in the
fall is missing the best part of the whole year. For gardening begins in
January, begins with the dream.
- Josephine Nuese, 1970, The Country Garden
There is no present or future, only
the past,
happening over and over again, now.
- Eugene O'Neill
Time is nature's way to keep
everything from happening at once.
- J. A. Wheeler
God gave us memories, that we might
have June roses in the December of our lives.
- James M. Barrie
Let me define a garden as the meeting
of raw nature and the
human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their
beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes
for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled
in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and
Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our
condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is
time and temporality.
- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life,
p. 96
Gardeners celebrate the influence of
time. If we have had a late cold spring
followed by a desiccating drought, autumn may be the most soft and golden
for years; one poor season will sooner or later be compensated for by another.
- Susan Hill and Rory Stuart, Reflections from a
Garden, 1995
Everyone has his day and some days
last longer than others.
- Winston Churchill
What a dead thing is a clock, with
its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass,
its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like
structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden
god
of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its
business-use
be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have
pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not
protracted after sunset, of temperance, and good hours. It was the
primitive clock, the horologue of the first world.
Adam could scare have missed it in Paradise.
- Charles Lamb, Essays, 1823
The butterfly counts not months but
moments, and has time enough.
- Rabindranath Tagore
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is
forever.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishin
in. I drink at it, but while
I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would
drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom
is pebbly with stars.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Even God cannot change the past.
- Agathon
The future is like heaven, everyone
exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
- James Baldwin
Years following years steal something
every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.
- Alexander Pope, 1688-1744
I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
- Robert Browning
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river
which sweeps me
along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the
tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Labryrinths
Nature often holds up a mirror so we
can see more clearly
the ongoing processes of growth, renewal,
and transformation in our lives.
- Mary Ann Brussat
I come like Water, and like Wind I
go.
- Edward Fitzgerald
With time and patience the mulberry
leaf becomes a silk gown.
- Chinese Proverb
Do not be attached to the past or
wait for the future.
Be grateful for each day, that is enough. I do not believe
in a future world, I deny the past. I believe entirely in the
present. Employ your entire body and mind in the
eternal now.
- Santoka Taneda, 1882-1940
Mountain Tasting, Translated by John Stevens
Summer, fall, winter, spring,
The seasons rotate as each brings
its special beauty to this earth of ours.
Winters' snow and Summers' flowers
Frozen rivers will flow come spring,
There is a renewal of everything.
- Edna Frohock
Time is the longest distance between
to places.
- Tennessee Williams
In times like these, it helps to
recall that there have always been times like these.
- Paul Harvey
Finally, I realized what makes my
garden exciting is me. Living in it every day,
participating minutely in each small event, I see with doubled and redoubled vision.
Where friends notice a solitary hummingbird pricking the salvia flowers, I recall
a season's worth of hummingbird battles.
- Janice Emily Bowers, A Full Life in a Small Place, 1993
At times I think and at times I
am.
- Paul Valery
The trouble with out times is that
the future is not what it used to be.
- Paul Valery
Without waiting forever in vain for
the preconceived,
to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that,
this doubtless is the right way to live.
- Henry James
Spring comes with flowers, autumn
with the moon,
summer with the breeze, winter with snow.
When idle concerns don't fill your thoughts,
that's your best season.
- Wu Men
It is necessary to write, if the days
are not to slip emptily by. How else,
indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment
passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where
the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on
the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth
of the soul, growth of the mind.
- Vita Sackville-West
We look backward too much and we look
forward too much;
thus we miss the only eternity of which we can be absolutely
sure – the eternal present, for it is always now.
- William Phelps
If you don't have time to do it right, you must have time to do it over.
Autumn - Quotes and Poems for Gardeners
Here is a little forest
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
- Emily Dickenson, #2, 1851
If your going to try to push nature,
it just pushes right back against you.
- Neil Dunaetz, Chicago's Cabrini-Green Gardens
Cloud Hands: Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong
All our moments are last moments.
We abide in the forever leaving
of our own coming? We can put our hands together, palm to palm,
settling here on the last leaf of our brief flight,
and bow to the wonder of it.
- Jen Jensen, Bowing to Receive the Mountain, 1997
You've got a lot pulling at your time
already – which may be
the best reason to start cultivating your green thumb.
- Steven Willson
People have schedules.
Plants have cycles. People will stay up late, get up early,
skip meals, cut corners, drive too fast, and otherwise work themselves into a
frenzy to get something done in less time. Some people live their entire lives this
way, rushing from one thing to the next, perpetually poised to seize the future.
Plants aren't like that. Oh sure, you can root prune a tomato plant to
trick the
fruit into ripening sooner. You can soak seeds overnight to hasten sprouting. And
no doubt the geneticists are fooling around with the timing of food crops along with
everything else. But that's all about human intervention. Left to itself,
a plant will
take every day, every moment that it requires. Plants know just what is meant
by
"the fullness of time," a phrase that seems to have slipped from our revved
up,
cut-to-the-chase conversations.
- Joyce McGreevy, Gardening by Heart: The Extraordinary Gift of an
Ordinary Garden
To affect the quality of the day,
that is the highest of arts.
- Henry David Thoreau
These roses under my window make no
reference to former roses or
to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.
There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in
every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers;
he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past,
or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee
the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he lives with nature in
the present, above time.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No greater thing is
created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes
or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that
there
must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
- Epictetus
Whether you know it or not, you are
the gardener
of your own being, the seed of your destiny.
- The Findhorn Community, The Findhorn Garden
"In Western languages the names
of the four seasons became complete only
a few centuries ago. Words for winter and summer appear quite early but
in English "spring" came to be used as the name of the season as late as
the
sixteenth century, and in German 'fruhjahr', "spring" appeared about the
same
time. Similarly, in India "hemanta(winter) and vasanta(spring)" appear in
Sanskrit literature very early, while other seasonal terms come much later."
- The
Importance of Season Words
The gardener's work is never at at end; it
begins with the year, and continues
to the next: he prepares the ground, and then he sows it; after that he plants,
and then he gathers the fruits....
- John Evelyn, Kalendarium Hortense, 1706
Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut
diamonds.
Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them
and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Time is four letter word and
so is Life.
Slower is a six letter word and so is Garden.
- Adapted from an Indian saying by Mike Garofalo
The seasons don't matter to most of
us anymore except as spectacles.
In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the
fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while
tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest
when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?
- Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's newfangled mirth;
But like each thing that in season grows.
- William Shakespeare
There was a time when meadow, grove and
stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore: -
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
- William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, Ode, Intimations of Immortality
Time is:
Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love,
Time is not.
~ Henry Van Dyke
An instant realization
sees endless time.
Endless time is as one moment.
When one comprehends the endless moment
He realizes the person who is seeing it.
- Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones,
p. 158
It has taken me half a lifetime
merely to find out what
is best worth doing, and a good slice out of another half
to puzzle out the ways of doing it."
- Gertrude Jekyll
Our true home is in the present
moment. To live in the present
moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The
miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment…
- Thich Nhat Hanh
I find nothing in fables more
astonishing than my experience
in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so
stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor
clime, nor hours,
days, months, which are the rags of time.
- John Donne
And pluck till time and times are
done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun.
- William B. Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus
Love makes time pass; time makes love
pass.
French Proverb
The future is something which
everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour,
whatever he does, whoever he is.
- Clive Staples Lewis
We can hold back neither the coming
of the flowers
nor the downward rush of the stream; sooner or later,
everything comes to its fruition.
- Loy Ching-Yuen
In eternity there is indeed something
true and sublime.
But all these times and places and occasions are now
and here. God himself culminates in the present
moment, and will never be more divine in the
lapse of all the ages.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
References and Links
Time and the Art of Living. By Robert Grudin. New York, Ticknor & Fields, 1982. 189 pages.
The four seasons in classical music compositions. By Kelly Ferjutz.
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity
and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions
Quips and Observations by Michael P.
Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas,
Contributions, and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Time- Seasons: Quotes for Gardeners.
Version 4.6.
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong
17 September 2005