Mohandas K. Gandhi:   To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

Bronson Alcott:      Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvest reaps. 

Henry David Thoreau:   Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:  Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying-out of gardens.

  

Thomas Jefferson:  Though an old man I am but a young gardener.

Vita Sackville-West:   Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.

…

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.

  

William Wordsworth:  Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

May Sarton:  A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Luis Barragán:  In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature.  In a beautiful garden the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life.

Colin Neenan :  Life just seems so full of connections.  Most of the time we don’t even pay attention to the depth of life. We only see flat surfaces.

Herman Melville:  The eyes are the gateway to the soul.

Benjamin Disraeli: How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.

Henry David Thoreau: Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

David S. Slawson: Poets and novelists are often moved to put into words the subtle qualities of the landscape, sometime purely for the beauty of it, and sometimes as a way of alluding to certain human feelings.  Landscape design can translate such literary landscapes into three-dimensional form in the garden.   Like the poet, the garden designer may allude to human feelings in his portrayals of nature.
Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens, 1987, p. 131

Ruth R. Blodgett:  We have learned that more of the “earth-earthiness” would solve our social problems, remove many isms from our vocabulary, and purify our art.  And so we often wish that those who interpret life for us by pen or brush would buy a trowel and pack of seeds.
The House Beautiful (March 1918)

Marcel Proust:  The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Rosemary Verey:  Colours change: in the morning light, red shines out bright and clear and the blues merge into heir surroundings, melting into the greens; but by the evening the reds loose their piquancy,
embracing a quieter tone and shifting toward the blues in the rainbow. Yellow flowers remain right, and white ones become luminous, shining like ghostly figures against a darkening green background.

The Scented Garden, 1981

Let me arise and open the gate,
to breathe the wild warm air of the heath,
And to let in Love, and to let out Hate,
And anger at living and scorn of Fate,
To let in Life, and to let out Death.
–  Violet Fane

Epictitus:  He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has. 

The creation and sustaining of this garden says something about the conditions and possibilities that exist within our marriage more than any words.  I take this garden as Dan the Man’s declaration of love.  He doesn’t talk much about his feelings, he does demonstrate them powerfully.

XOX Susanne

Frederich Nietzsche:  Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment – a little makes the way of the best happiness.
Thus Spake Zarathustra

Part One (Earlier Garden Post)

For Dan, who gave me the one thing that I could hang on to, two versions: