I spent the first three weeks of the lockdown in the garden engaged in horticultural therapy. The garden and I are much better for it.

I struggle to express my reverence for my garden so I collated my favourite quotes from other gardeners. Enjoy.

“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

“I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation.”

Phyllis Theroux

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero

“A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.”

Gertrude Jekyll

“Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job.”

George Bernard Shaw

“All my hurts my garden spade can heal”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“As a gardener, I’m among those who believe that much of the evidence of God’s existence has been planted.”

Robert Brault

“Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything – except itself.”

May Sarton

“Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.”

Lewis Gannit

“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.”

Francis Bacon

“I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me.”

Robert Brault

“In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful.”

Abram L. Urban

“One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one’s horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?”

Francis Cabot Lowell

“One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”

Wendell Berry

“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

“To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”

Mahatma Gandhi