Gardening Quotes (Motivation to Grow Your Garden)

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Get inspired to grow your garden to new heights with these beautiful gardening quotes!

Check out our post, Gardening | A Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Garden to learn everything you need to know about starting your own gardening hobby.

“A weed is but an unloved flower.”  

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals  

“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece”

Claude Monet  

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”  

Abraham Lincoln

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”

Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays  

“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.”

Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden 

“April is the kindest month. April gets you out of your head and out working in the garden.”

Marty Rubin  
photo: Markus Spiske

“There’s something satisfying about getting your hands in the soil.” 

E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly 

“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.”

Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World  

“Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.”  

Eudora Welty

“Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn’t necessarily expect to witness.”

Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education  

“To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world.”  

Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

“Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible.”  

Anne Wareham

“By bringing a soulful consciousness to gardening sacred space can be created outdoors.”  

S. Kelley Harrell, Nature’s Gifts Anthology

“Our most important job as vegetable gardeners is to feed and sustain soil life, often called the soil food web, beginning with the microbes. If we do this, our plants will thrive, we’ll grow nutritious, healthy food, and our soil conditions will get better each year. This is what is meant by the adage ”Feed the soil not the plants.”  

Jane Shellenberger, Organic Gardener’s Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West

“There is nothing so good for writing as doing a bit of gardening, and there is nothing so bad for gardening as being a writer.”

James Rozoff  
photo: Priscilla Du Preez

“What I am saying is that lovely, whimsical, and soulful things happen in a garden, leaving a gardener giddy.”  

Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“If you really want to be a good gardener, you need to understand what is going on in your soil.”  

Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web

“Nothing tastes better than the fresh picked fruits of your own labor. No air smells sweeter than when supplied by flowers grown with your own two hands.”  

Jessica Marie Baumgartner, The Magic of Nature: Meditations & Spells to Find Your Inner Voice

“The realization that no matter what you do, no matter how many little mistakes you make, you are still probably going to come up with reasonably good, usable compost.”

Stu Campbell, Let it Rot!: The Gardener’s Guide to Composting  

“There really isn’t anything like eating from your own garden.”

A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo  

“No matter the state of the world, or how dark the shadow that has fallen on our city, I find it curiously comforting to know that if you plant a seed and give it sunlight and water, it will grow.”

Sarah Jio, All the Flowers in Paris  

“Spring has always been the dearest friend to me, with her voice like a feather tossed on the wind. With a tin pail of water in hand, I set out into the gardens grown in her warmth. A straw hat shields my cheek from the rosy stain of her sunlit kiss. When the work of the day is done, I find my little shelter in her embrace.”  

Erin Forbes

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” 

May Sarton 

“The laws of nature remind us that no matter how long, seeds do grow. Push through long enough to see your seeds grow.”

Andrena Sawyer  

“A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, some for a long time, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future.”

W.S. Merwin, What Is a Garden?  

“Going out to the garden is to go on a holiday; when you travel amongst the flowers, your body touches heaven and your mind tastes the secrets of ataraxia!” 

Mehmet Murat ildan 
photo: Jonathan Kemper

“This is, however, one of the greatest delights of a garden; the nearly hypnotic ability it has to make you slow down, consider things about life more carefully, wrangle over difficulties with care and imagination rather than anger and ferocity.”

Mary F. Irish, A Place All Our Own: Lives Entwined in a Desert Garden  

“When I die, bury me with a few garden tools, I shall make a garden in the heaven too.” 

Preeth Nambiar, The Solitary Shores 

“When you grow your own garden, it grows you.”  

 T.F. Hodge

“A garden is made of hope.”

W.S. Merwin, What Is a Garden?  

“Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.”  

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“A garden is where you can find a whole spectrum of life, birth and death” 

Tiffany Baker, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County 

“Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.” 

Andy Couturier 

“Some say that a garden just grows from seeds, but we think it grows from trying and failing and trying again. A garden is hard work, but so is most of the good, important stuff in life.”

Joanna Gaines, We Are the Gardeners  
photo: Pille R. Priske

“Half the interest of the garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.” 

Mrs. C.W. Earle 

“Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative’s latest example of unreasonableness.” 

Christopher Lloyd, The Well-Tempered Garden 

“Life’s a garden. Dig it!”

Joe Dirt

“Gardening is about cheating, about persuading unlikely plants to survive in unlikely places and when that trick is well accomplished the results can be highly satisfying.”

David Wheeler

“One of the pleasures of being a gardener comes from the enjoyment you get looking at other people’s yards.”  

Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There Is a Season: The Gardening Year

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Hopefully this list of gardening quotes has you fired-up and ready to start planting! Looking for more hobby ideas? Check out our Huge List of Hobbies from A to Z here…