Nature Quotes for Quoting and Illustrating
in Your Nature Journal & Sketchbook
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on Earth.
~ Dorothy Frances Gurney ‘Garden Thoughts’
God Almighty first planted a garden.
And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasure.
It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man.
~ Francis Bacon ‘Essays’
The very act of planting a seed in the earth has in it to me something beautiful … I watch my garden beds after they are sown, and think how one of God’s exquisite miracles is going on beneath the dark earth out of sight.
~ Celia Thaxter ‘My Island Garden’
I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God
it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.’
~ F. Frankfort Moore ‘A Garden of Peace’
If you want to be happy all your life, plant a garden.
~ Chinese proverb
Though a life of retreat offers various joys,
None, I think, will compare with the time one employs
In the study of herbs or in the strive to gain
Some practical knowledge of nature’s domain.
~ Abbot Walafrid Strabo ‘Hortulus’
A morning-glory at my window
satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
~ Walt Whitman ‘Song of Myself’
Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals.
It is creation in the pure sense.
~ Phyllis McGinley ‘The Province of the Heart’
The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the whole world.
~ Charles Dudley Warner ‘My Summer in a Garden’
I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered ….
No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the Earth.
~ Thomas Jefferson
A garden: a thing of beauty and a job forever.
~ Anonymous
I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature,
not her truculent master.
~ Reginald Farrer ‘In a Yorkshire Garden, 1909’
Flowers … seem to smile; some have a sad expression;
some are pensive and diffident;
others again are plain, honest and upright,
like the broad-faced sunflower and the hollyhock.
~ Henry Ward Beecher ‘Star Papers: A Discourse of Flowers’
Sweet is the garden, white with bloom,
Heavy with honey, drenched with scent
~ Katharine Tynan Hinkson ‘Love Content’
No evening scents, I think, have the fascination of the delicate fragrance of the evening primroses, especially that of the commonest variety. Those pale moons irradiate the twilight with their sweet elusive perfumes.
~ Eleanour Sinclair Rohde ‘The Scented Garden’
How beautiful a garden is when all the fruit-trees are in bloom,
and how various that bloom is!
~ Henry Bright ‘A Year in a Lancashire Garden, 1901’
No pear-blossom can compare with the beauty of blossom
on the apple-trees…when every bough is laden with clusters
of deep-red buds, which shade off into the softest rosy white,
as one by one their blossoms open out.
~ Henry Bright ‘A Year in a Lancashire Garden, 1901’
Just now the lilac is in bloom
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow…
~ Robert Brooke ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’
We once had a lily here that bore 108 flowers on one stalk….
The bees came from miles and miles…
~ Edith Sitwell
I wish I could in any words paint
the hues of these splendid delphiniums;
Such shades of melting blue,
some light, others dark,
some like the summer heaven,
And some dashed across their pale azure wings with delicious rose.
~ Celia Thaxter ‘An Island Garden, 1894’
Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight,
With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all thigns,
To bind them all about with tiny rings.
~ John Keats
Such geraniums! It does not become us poor mortals to be vain – but, really, my geraniums!
~ Mary Mitford ‘Our Village’
Earth laughs in flowers.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ‘Hamatreya’
