Jane Hirshfield Quotes

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

Let us cultivate our garden.

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.

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.

If a garden require it, now trench it ye may, one trench not a yard, from another go lay; Which being well filled with muck by and by, to cover with mould, for a season to lie.

Where there's no gardener, there's no garden.

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

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

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

Gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I also know that we should cultivate our gardens.

Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.

Gardening is a humbling experience.

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

Gardening is peaceful, yet there is a great element of failure. It's the perfect metaphor for life -- a lot of pleasure, then it's over. There's great satisfaction in tending something, feeling it needs you, even if it's just a plant on your windowsill.

We should amuse our evening hours of life in cultivating the tender plants, and bringing them to perfection, before they are transplanted to a happier clime.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

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