Gertrude Jekyll Quotes

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.

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

Gardening is a humbling experience.

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

I also like to garden. I grow things, vegetables, flowers... I particularly like orchids. I raise orchids.

I have always wanted to be a gardener, and I love the time I spend in my garden.

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.

I call myself, 'The Estee Lauder of the garden world.' I'm my own little conglomerate.

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

I'm a flower gardener.

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.

If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.

The good Husbandman may pluck His rose & gather in His lily.

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.

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

Gardening is not something to get on your high horse about or be overwhelmed by. Either you enjoy it or you don't.

This gardener will be out in the very early morning and from late afternoon, attentive to small changes in the quality of light and the atmosphere, as well as to every nuance of the season, which combine to create perfection.

Planting a flower's like opening a book, because either way you're starting something. And your garden's your library.

True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.

He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.

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.

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.