Landscape Design Quotes

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.

Architecture is the thoughtful making of space.

Architecture is invention.

What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?

Architecture is a political art connecting our values to the ages.

I've always admired gardens. My father was a great nature lover and would always take me for walks. We lived not too far away from huge rhododendron estates and azalea estates, and when they're in bloom in England, they're just riotous.

God Almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks. And a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection.

When I'm in my 50s, I kind of think I'll want to be in a garden.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece

China has some cities, traditional cities, with a long history. They are so beautiful, and they were planned so smartly. I call them gardens on the city scale. For example, Beijing has mountains, waters, lakes, bridges, towers. It was a very poetic city.

Last summer I was staying at a house in Hampshire which was famous for the brilliance and the originality of its gardens. There were many of them, but the most beautiful of all was a walled garden in which every flower was blue. There were all the obvious things like delphiniums and acronitums and larkspurs, but the most beautiful blue of all came from the groups of cabbages - the ordinary blue pickling cabbage. Set against the blazing blue of the other flowers, it had a bloom and elegance which made it a thing of the greatest delight.

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

The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

Of all human activities, apart from the procreation of children, gardening is the most optimistic and hopeful. The gardener is by definition one who plans for and believes and trusts in a future, whether in the short or the longer term.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

Architecture is a special kind of career that showcases the accumulations of culture, time, and history.

Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.

Architecture is by definition a very collaborative process.

The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.

I have felt terribly from the beginning when I saw the problems and recognized that they would be ongoing. We were hired to put back the contours of the greens as closely as possible to George Thomas's designs and were real proud of what we did. It's a sad situation now.

I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.

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

Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.

Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning; by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts.