Some of my fondest memories as a child are of digging in the garden. What makes gardening so special is the many benefits that planting offers. The time and effort that you put into gardening is given back to you twofold in the form of fruits and vegetables for your family and beautiful flowers to decorate with and admire. Gardening is also an enjoyable form of aerobic exercise that can help build your muscles, increase stamina and flexibility, and keep your heart healthy. If you’re lacking the motivation to get out in your garden, check out these inspirational quotes, pick up your trowel and head outside.
- “The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body but the soul.” – Alfred Austin (English poet)
- “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 (famed English horticulturist)
- “There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.” – Janet Kilburn Phillips (English gardening expert)
- “Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food, and medicine for the soul.” – Luther Burbank (American botanist)
- “A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” – Liberty Hyde Bailey (American horticulturist and botanist)
- “Gardening requires lots of water (most of it in the form of perspiration).” – Lou Erickson
- “The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.” – Hanna Rion (garden writer)
- “Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing without feeling guilty and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity.” – Lindley Karstens (American artist)
- “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 (American author and journalist)
- “It is 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 (Australian author)
- “It didn’t occur to me … that gardening, like music, could demand practice, patience, a willingness to make mistakes.” – Amy Stewart (American author)
- “Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint and the soil and the sky as canvas.” – Elizabeth Murray (American artist)
- “We might think that we are nurturing our garden, but of course, it’s our garden that is really nurturing us.” – Jenny Uglow (English author)
- “Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you’re restoring your own soul.” – Alice Walker (American novelist)
- “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 (American poet and novelist)
- “Gardening is the work of a lifetime: You never finish.” – Oscar de la Renta (Dominican-American fashion designer)