Rick Bragg Quotes

Literally, if someone says I am grounded, everyday I am at home, I actually have my hands in the ground and dirt under my fingernails. I don't have a staff to do it all for me. I still plant a seed and I'm amazed it grows.

Let us cultivate our garden.

My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered.

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

I have a green thumb. I really like to get into the shrubs, the bushes, and really cultivate.

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

I grew up working on farms. You'd do anything for money. You'd pick blueberries in the summertime for weeks; you'd cut down, like, spruce and fir trees for pulp.

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?

I like the physical activity of gardening. It's kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding.

The vinery is not made with blessings, but with hoes and spades.

I like gardening.

I was a hard-workin' little boy. Oh, I worked. Pullin' cotton, shockin' grain, cuttin' wheat, loadin' wheat, choppin' cotton, cleanin' chicken houses, milkin' cows, plowin'.

I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn't make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.

Even though I hated doing farming and wanted to just get out of the village, I would work from 5 in the morning till 5 in the evening.

I'm a huge garden and landscape fanatic.

In some other life I must have been a pioneer woman because I love to have my hands in the dirt.

In a delightful garden, sowing, planting or digging are not hardship but are done with a zeal and a certain pleasure.

I make bean stalks, I'm A builder, like yourself.

A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it.

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. ‘The Spirit is a garden,’ said he

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.

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.