Vita Sackville-West Quotes

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

I came to these mediums through having the garden, and of course, people who have designed gardens have always worked in collaboration, and never made their own inscriptions.

It's my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they've got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very minor role.

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.

It does seem to me that the British in particular, British horticultural literature and television programmes, focus a huge amount on how we garden and hardly at all on why we garden.

I'm a huge garden and landscape fanatic.

Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.

My favorite thing is landscaping. I love landscaping. And so what I'll do is, mostly I put language into search engines, and if I want to look, like, at tulip gardens, or, like, Georgian gardens, i love English gardens, how they're laid out. Japanese gardens, Asian gardens. So, I'm kind of a frustrated landscaper.

I adore gardening, and whenever I have time off, that is my passion.

Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.

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

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.

To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace.

Gardening as far as Gardening is Art, or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a Garden.

Nothing is more completely the child of art than a garden.

A garden must be looked unto and dressed as the body.

Last summer I was staying at a house in Hampshire which was famous for the brilliance and the originality of its gardens. There were many of them, but the most beautiful of all was a walled garden in which every flower was blue. There were all the obvious things like delphiniums and acronitums and larkspurs, but the most beautiful blue of all came from the groups of cabbages - the ordinary blue pickling cabbage. Set against the blazing blue of the other flowers, it had a bloom and elegance which made it a thing of the greatest delight.

A Garden, an Elaboratory, a Work - house, Improvements and Breeding, are pleasant and Profitable Diversions to the Idle and Ingenious: For here they miss Ill Company, and converse with Nature and Art; whose Variety are equally grateful and instructing; and preserve a good Constitution of Body and Mind.

There are several ways to lay out a little garden; the best way is to get a gardener.

Somewhere, a long way away, people are doing sensible things like mowing lawns and digging gardens.

Yes, I'd love to have a garden of my own--spacious, and full of everything that is fragrant and flowering. But if I don't succeed, never mind--I've still got the dream.

Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece