Stephen Gardiner Quotes

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

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

Sunken gardens should be laid out under the supervision of an intelligent landscape architect; and even then should have a reason for being sunken other than a whim or increase in costliness.

I always design a landscape with fixed horizons whether it be mountains or a stone wall around a 20-foot-square plot.

A garden is half made when it is well planned.

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.

There are about a dozen of these gardens, more or less extensive, according to the business or wealth of the proprietor; but they are generally smaller than the smallest of our London nurseries.

No doubt these rocky islands have suggested the idea worked out in gardens, and they have been well imitated.

One of the first gardens I did outside the family was for the designer Hattie Carnegie. I was 23 then, and I went to her salon, but could not afford any of her dresses myself, though I loved them. Miss Carnegie suggested I do a garden in exchange for a coat and dress, and so I designed and planted a garden for her.

I've got my organic veg patch and fruit; we're very garden-obsessed, my husband and I. He designed a garden for me for Christmas, so beautiful! Alasdhair's very good at the proportion and ground work, and I come in and do the planting and the color scheme.

I haven't really got a green thumb, but I love gardens and their architecture.

For fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment, but Pools mar all, and make the Garden unwholesome, and full of Flies and Frogs.

The possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention.

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.

A garden scheme should have a backbone - a central idea beautifully phrased.

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

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

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.

Let us cultivate our garden.

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

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.

There are few gardens that can be left alone. A few years of neglect and only the skeleton of a garden can be traced. . . . Japanese artists working with a few stones and sand four hundred years ago achieved strangely lasting compositions. However there, too, but for the hands that have piously raked the white sand into patterns and controlled the spread of moss and lichens, little would remain.

The charges of building and making of gardens are unknowne.

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.