Monty Don Quotes

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.

The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.

There are few plants that are ugly. It's how you use them that may not be pretty.

I've always had an affinity for growing things.

Gardening is not a rational act.

I think gardens are fantastic, and I'd love to draw and design and stuff like that. I love just planting flowers during the summer. There's something very humble about it, and natural and beautiful.

Working with the earth is peaceful for me.

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 gardener, and I love to plant.

The public must learn how to cherish the nobler and rarer plants, and to plant the aloe, able to wait a hundred years for it's bloom, or it's garden will contain, presently, nothing but potatoes and pot-herbs.

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

To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes.

Gardening is a humbling experience.

If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

To cultivate a garden is to walk with God.

The future of life on Earth depends on our ability to see the sacred where others see only the common

Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

Because we all share this planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. This is not just a dream, but a necessity.

Then there are those who plant. they endure storms and all the many vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But, unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener's constant attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.

Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.

Let us cultivate our garden.

Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world

We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature.