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Here are a few of our favorite quotes and poems on gardens and related topics:

 

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn (1820)

 

All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
- Joseph Joubert

 

There's little risk in becoming overly proud of one's
garden because by its very nature is humbling.
It has a way of keeping you on your knees.
- JoAnn Barwick

 

Even the smallest landscape can offer pride of ownership not only
to its inhabitants but to its neighbors. The world delights in a garden....
Creating any garden, big or small, is, in the end, all about joy.
- Julie Moir Messervy

 

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

 

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back
and realize they were the big things.
- Robert Brault

 

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of
strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something
infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature— the assurance
that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
- Rachel Carson

 

If you have a mind at peace, and a heart that cannot harden,
Go find a door that opens wide upon a lovely garden.
- Author Unknown

 

 

A Prayer in Spring
by Robert Frost

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
To which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends he will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.

 

The Flower
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Once in a golden hour
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.

To and fro they went
Thro' my garden bower,
And muttering discontent
Cursed me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall
It wore a crown of light,
But thieves from o'er the wall
Stole the seed by night.

Sow'd it far and wide
By every town and tower,
Till all the people cried,
"Splendid is the flower!"

Read my little fable:
He that runs may read.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,
And some are poor indeed;
And now again the people
Call it but a weed.

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