80 Gardening Inspiration Quotes to Nurture Your Soul

"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

"We might think we are nurturing our garden, but of course it's our garden that is really nurturing us."

- Jenny Uglow

"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

"We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the Garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest."

- Voltaire

"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

"When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden."

- Minnie Aumonier

"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

"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

"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

"The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies."

- Gertrude Jekyll

"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food, and medicine for the soul."

- Luther Burbank

"My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece."

- Claude Monet

"To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"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

"My garden is my favorite teacher."

- Betsy Garmon

"If you've never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden."

- Robert Brault

"The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all."

- Wendell Berry

"I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation."

- Phyllis Theroux

"In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener."

- Robert Rodale

"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

"I love my garden, and I love working in it. To potter with green growing things, watching each day to see the dear, new sprouts come up, is like taking a hand in creation, I think. Just now my garden is like faith – the substance of things hoped for."

- Lucy Maud Montgomery

"Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get."

- H. Jackson Brown

"The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway."

- Michael Pollan

"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

"A weed is but an unloved flower."

- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"It will never rain roses: When we want to have more roses, we must plant more trees."

- George Eliot

"Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized."

- Allan Armitage

"Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating."

- Wendell Berry

"I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden."

- Ruth Stout

"If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. "Green fingers" are a fact and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart."

- Russell Page

"God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures."

- Francis Bacon

"It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn."

- B. C. Forbes

"Garden as though you will live forever."

- William Kent

"There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments."

- Janene Wolsey Baadsgaard

"Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of humanity."

- Daniel Webster

"The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses."

- Hanna Rion

"Green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart."

- Russell Page

"No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden."

- Thomas Jefferson

"I've always felt that having a garden is like having a good and loyal friend."

- C.Z. Guest

"How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening."

- Alexander Smith

"I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations."

- Penelope Keith

"One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides."

- W.E. Johns

"How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence."

- Benjamin Disraeli

"However many years she lived, Mary always felt that 'she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow'."

- Frances Hodgson Burnett

"It always amazes me to look at the little, wrinkled brown seeds and think of the rainbows in 'em," said Captain Jim. "When I ponder on them seeds I don't find it nowise hard to believe that we've got souls that'll live in other worlds. You couldn't hardly believe there was life in them tiny things, some no bigger than grains of dust, let alone colour and scent, if you hadn't seen the miracle, could you?"

- L.M. Montgomery

"The master of the garden is the one who waters it, trims the branches, plants the seeds, and pulls the weeds. If you merely stroll through the garden, you are but an acolyte."

- Vera Nazarian

"Feed the soil, not your plants."

- Charles Dowding

"It's incredible to reflect on how much knowledge and growth power is contained in seeds."

- Charles Dowding

"There's something satisfying about getting your hands in the soil."

- E.A. Bucchianeri

"Gardens are not made by singing "Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade."

- Rudyard Kipling

"I like gardening—it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself."

- Alice Sebold

"If a tree dies, plant another in its place."

- Carolus Linnaeus

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land."

- Abraham Lincoln

"I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit."

- Reginald Farrer

"The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there."

- George Bernard Shaw

"Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them."

- A.A. Milne

"May I a small house and large garden have;And a few friends,And many books, both true."

- Abraham Cowley

"Your soil and plants are friends that benefit from constant care and attention to the details I explain."

- Charles Dowding

"Gardening is easier than it is often made out to be."

- Charles Dowding

"We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives."

- Parker J. Palmer

"But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that."

- Edna Ferber

"Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts."

- Sigmund Freud

"Use plants to bring life."

- Douglas Wilson

"There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy."

- Ken Kesey

"A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant – rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance – but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself."

- Roberto Marx

"All gardening is landscape painting."

- Alexander Pope

"It is easier to tell a person what life is not, rather than to tell them what it is. A child understands weeds that grow from lack of attention, in a garden. However, it is hard to explain the wild flowers that one gardener calls weeds, and another considers beautiful ground cover."

- Shannon L. Alder

"When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles."

- Horace Walpole

"Keep an open mind and try some new methods."

- Charles Dowding

"The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture."

- Thomas Jefferson

"He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why."

- J.M. Coetzee

"Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow."

- Zora Neale Hurston

"A person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion."

- Liberty Hyde Bailey

"I want you to understand what you are doing, not just perform tasks because I say so."

- Charles Dowding

"In a world full of roses, stand out like a dandelion in the middle of a green, plush lawn!"

- June Stoyer

"The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard."

- Joel Salatin

"Doesn't matter what you do, or how you do it, your neighbors are gonna talk about you ANYWAY."

- Felder Rushing