Gardening Therapy Quotes

It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season.

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.

What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.

Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissingthe tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.

What do gardeners do when they retire?

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

I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.

A garden is a kinetic work of art, not an object but a process, open-ended, biodegradable, nurturant, like all women's artistry. A garden is the best alternative therapy.

Gardening is the greatest tonic and therapy a human being can have. Even if you have only a tiny piece of earth, you can create something beautiful, which we all have a great need for. If we begin by respecting plants, it's inevitable we'll respect people.

I look upon the pleasure we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life.

Gardening has just sort of grown on me. I find it therapeutic. And I like smelly things.

All my hurts my garden spade can heal.

We are extremely uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects of gardening, and yet most people feel it in some form or other, even if it's a sense of connection to the greater world on a beautiful day.

My good hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to bite my enemies. In the smoothing the rough hillocks, I smooth my temper.

I find the love of garden grows upon me as I grow older more and more. Shrubs and flowers and such small gay things, that bloom and please and fade and wither and are gone and we care not for them, are refreshing interests, in life, and if we cannot say never fading pleasures, we may say unreproved pleasures and never grieving losses.

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.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. Share the botanical bliss of gardeners through the ages, who have cultivated philosophies to apply to their own - and our own - lives: Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.