Michael Heseltine Quotes

A plant is like a self-willed man, out of whom we can obtain all which we desire, if we will only treat him his own way.

Only years of practice will teach you the mysteries and bold certainty of a real gardener, who treads at random, yet tramples on nothing.

If you wish to enrich days, plant flowers; If you wish to enrich years, plant trees; If you wish to enrich Eternity, plant ideals in the lives of others.

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

I love to prune my roses. That's the one thing I really feel I do pretty well. Other things I usually, because I travel so much, leave to my gardeners who know what I love. But I do love to prune them, because you forget everything else. It's like if you're a painter, you can forget everything else while you're doing it.

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

I am a gardener, I have a big green thumb, and I can take care of these plants really easily because they are all fake.

I think that's my strength, that I am an amateur gardener who loves gardening. I've read about it, I've written about it, I've done it all my life but at heart, I'm just a passionate amateur gardener.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise.

To me, trees are living beings and they have their own sort of personalities.

The fool who loves giving advice on our garden never tends his own plants

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.

Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye 're sleeping.

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

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

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose, And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows.

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

Time that weakens all things else has but strengthened the impregnable position of the believer's faith and hope and confidence. And as, year by year, the tree adds another ring to its circumference, every age has added the testimony of its events to this great truth. "The grass withereth, and the flower fadeth, but the word of the Lord shall endure forever.

It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these western woods ... Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time-and long before that-God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools.

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

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over.

Happy indeed is the naturalist: to him the seasons come round like old friends; to him the birds sing: as he walks along, the flowers stretch out from the hedges, or look up from the ground, and as each year fades away, he looks back on a fresh store of happy memories.

That small circle of earth became a second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts.

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