Henry Beard Quotes

Pick the weeds and keep the flowers.

The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favorites; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.

My own back yard, and my mom and dad's back yard, is where I learned about tomatoes and weeds and daily maintenance.

I love working in the garden.

I'm usually pretty good in the garden.

I like gardening.

Weeding is as necessary to agriculture as sowing.

Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables.

Our finest flowers are often weeds transplanted.

To plant and maintain a flower border, with a good scheme for colour, is by no means the easy thing that is commonly supposed.

My soul, be satisfied with flowers, with fruit, with weeds even; but gather them in the one garden you may call your own.

I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.

When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs.

The man who wants a garden fair, or small or very big, With flowers growing here and there, Must bend his back and dig. The things are mighty few on earth That wishes can attain. Whate'er we want of any worth We've got to work to gain. It matters not what goal you seek, It's secret here reposes: You've got to dig from week to week To get Results or Roses.

Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work.

Heliotrope. To be sowed in the spring. A delicious flower, but I suspect it must be planted in boxes and kept in the house in the winter. The smell rewards the care.

But for one's health as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.

It may be a weed instead of a fish that, after all my labour, I at last pull up.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

I'm not saying find someone and ask them if you can mow their grass for ten dollars. I'm saying find weeds that need pulling and pull them.

A flower is an educated weed.

Looking at a first assembly is kind of like looking at an overgrown garden. You can't just wade in with a weed whacker; you don't yet know where the stems of the flowers are.

The ideal is the flower-garden of the mind, and very apt to run to weeds unless carefully tended.

...To be honest, I'd be the last person who should be doling out gardeinng advice. I don't have the patience for growing things. Yes, I realize there's nothing quite as satisfying as eating food that you've pulled up from the ground and that's why, at the height of the planting season, I bury cans of tomato soup in my backyard and dig them up in late spring.