Horticulture Quotes

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”
― Dorothy Parker, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

“I want you to understand what you are doing, not just perform tasks because I say so.”
― Charles Dowding, Charles Dowding's Skills for Growing

“Your soil and plants are friends that benefit from constant care and attention to the details I explain.”
― Charles Dowding, Charles Dowding's Skills for Growing

“Gardening is easier than it is often made out to be.”
― Charles Dowding, Charles Dowding's Skills for Growing

“Watching gardeners label their plants
I vow with all beings
to practice the old horticulture
and let plants identify me.”
― Robert Aitken, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps: Verses for Zen Buddhist Practice

“Note what the catalogue says about colour and height and time of flowering, choose the appropriate shade of crayon and mark position of plant on plan. You will soon see what would make good neighbours nd what would be fatal. Last year I dumped a lot of seeds haphazardly in a hurry and got mesembryanthemums and a new ‘electric orange’ calendula mingled with a scarlet eschscholtzia and even the thought of it makes me shudder yet. The conjunction of paralytic pink, blinding blood-orange and genuine clear scarlet was practically un-lookable at. I expected it to blow up at any moment, …”
― Ethelind Fearon

“Pay attention to me.”
― Sally Quinn

“We never look at the grass, though it is ubiquitous. If it's left alone to shake its hair loose it will produce tiny tassels and flowers, miniature and beautiful, that I'd never noticed before. Beauty is so often size and commotion for us, and fancy labels, that the subterfuge of loveliness all around us goes unseen.”
― Keith Miller, The Book of Flying

“There is a delicate-looking plant native to North America called bleeding heart.”
― Josh Aterovis, Bleeding Hearts

“Biological evidence indicates that man, evolving with his food plants, developed horticulture and agriculture in both hemispheres at a time which may well have reached far back into the Pleistocene.”
― Russell Lord The Care of the Earth

“One cannot analyse the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt and Italy to the forests of Europe”
― Tom Turner, European Gardens: History, Philosophy and Design

“I am concerned that the ladies are ill-treated."
"The ladies who frequent the Fallen Angel are not ill-treated."
Her brows knit together. "How do you know?"
"Because they are under my protection."
She froze. "They are?"
He was suddenly warm. "They are. We do all we can to ensure that they are well treated and well paid while under our roof. If they are manhandled, they call for one of the security detail. They file a complaint with me. And if I discover a member is mistreating ladies beneath this roof, his membership is revoked."
She paused for a long moment, considering the words, and finally said, "I have a passion for horticulture."
He wasn't certain how plants had anything to do with prostitutes, but he knew better than to interrupt.
She continued, the words quick and forthright, as though they entirely made sense. "I've made a rather remarkable discovery recently," she said, and his attention lingered on the breathlessness of the words. On the way her mouth curved in a small, private smile. She was proud of herself, and he found- even before she admitted her finding- that he was proud of her. Odd, that. "It is possible to take a piece of one rosebush and affix it to another. And when the process is completed properly... say, a white piece on a red bush... an entirely new rose grows..." She paused, and the rest of the words rushed out, as though she were almost afraid of them. "A pink one."
Cross did not know much about horticulture, but he knew enough about scientific study to know that the finding would be groundbreaking. "How did you-"
She raised a hand to stop the question. "I'll happily show you. It's very exciting. But that's not the point."
He waited for her to arrive at the point in question.
She did. "The career... it is not their choice. They're not red or white anymore. They're pink. And you're why."
Somehow, it made sense that she compared the ladies of the Angel to this experiment in roses. Somehow, this woman's strange, wonderful brain worked in a way that he completely understood.”
― Sarah MacLean, One Good Earl Deserves a Lover

“Working in garden is like digging knowledge from the earth.”
― Karthikeyan V

“Years ago, when she'd studied the constructions of stem, blade, stamen, ovule, she loved the infinite possibilities of the plant kingdom- but she had been interested in color, scent, presentation: the beautiful names- cloth-of-gold crocus; ash-leaved trumpet, star-of-Bethlehem; meadow saffron- the loveliness of a blown field of asters or irises, a ring of roses to bed a wedding cake, the careful depiction of a peony in cross section on the page, a gentian constructed in icing. She knew all about beauty and almost nothing of utility.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Birds of Paradise

“The cave was cool and silent- thoroughly carpeted- with the most luxuriant mantle of mosses Alma Whittaker had ever seen.
The cave was not merely mossy; it throbbed with moss. It was not merely green; it was frantically green. It was so bright in its verdure that the color nearly spoke, as though- smashing through the world of sight- it wanted to migrate into the world of sound. The moss was a thick, living pelt, transforming every rock surface into a mythical, sleeping beast. Improbably, the deepest corners of the cave glittered the brightest; they were absolutely studded, Alma realized with a gasp, with the jewellike filigree of 'Schistotega pennata.'
Goblin's gold, dragon's gold, elfin gold- 'Schistotega pennata' was that rarest of cave mosses, that false gem that gleams like a cat's eye from within the permanent twilight of geologic shade, that unearthly sparkling plant that needs but the briefest sliver of light each day to sparkle like glory forever, that brilliant trickster whose shining facets have fooled so many travelers over the centuries into believing that they have stumbled upon hidden treasure. But to Alma, this 'was' treasure, more stunning than actual riches, for it bedecked the entire cave in the uncanny, glistering, emerald light that she had only ever before seen in miniature, in glimpses of moss seen through a microscope... yet now she was standing fully within it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Yes, I had dreamed of becoming a botanist, my entire life, really. I'd thought a great deal about the various species of maple and rhododendron while braiding challah, and I'd successfully planted a wisteria vine in a large pot and trained it over the awning of the bakery. And at night, after we closed shop, I volunteered at the New York Botanical Garden. Sweeping up cuttings and fallen leaves hardly seemed like work when it provided the opportunity to gaze into the eye of a Phoenix White peony or a Lady Hillingdon rose, with petals the color of apricot preserves.
Yes, horticulture, not pastries, was my passion.”
― Sarah Jio, The Last Camellia

“I like landscape architecture. And I studied horticulture the old-fashioned way—by watching golf on TV.”
― Jarod Kintz, Me and memes and memories

“One day is not enough to green our earth. Planting caring and love is also expecting our earth from us. Do it, It will heal not only the land but also your body and mind.”
― Karthikeyan V

“Caring nature is the best commitments you can do for your feature!!!”
― Karthikeyan V

“It was Nicholas' pride to have one example of every tree which could be grown in that locality, and many of these he had imported by schooner from Europe and the Orient straight to the Dragonwyck dock- the Incense Cedar, the Weeping Cypress, the Judas Tree, the Gingko with its fan-shaped leaves, and the delicate bronze Japanese Maple- these were hardly enough to live outside; but the palms and aloes, the oleanders and the orchids, grew in the elaborate greenhouses or in the conservatory off the dinging-room.”
― Anya Seton, Dragonwyck

“Of all the countries Fairchild had visited, Japan struck him as the most advanced on matters of horticulture. He learned about Japanese miniature gardens, the art of Japanese papermaking, and the superior qualities of Japanese fruits and vegetables that didn't grow anywhere else in the world. Wealthy people introduced him to foods of affluence, like raw fish, seaweed, and a bean cheese they called tofu. He thought it impossible to eat with two narrow sticks held in one hand, but after a few tries, he got the feel for it.
It was in Japan that Fairchild picked up a yellow plum known as a loquat and an asparagus-like vegetable called udo. And a so-called puckerless persimmon that turned sweet in sake wine casks. One of the most unrecognized discoveries of Fairchild, a man drawn to edible fruits and vegetables, was zoysia grass, a rich green lawn specimen attractive for the thickness of its blades and its slow growth, which meant it required infrequent cutting.
And then there was wasabi, a plant growing along streambeds in the mountains near Osaka. It had edible leaves, but wasabi's stronger quality was its bitter root's uncanny ability to burn one's nose. Wasabi only lasted in America until farmers realized that its close relative the horseradish root grew faster and larger and was more pungent than the delicate wasabi (which tends to stay pungent only fifteen minutes after it's cut). Small American farms still grow Fairchild's wasabi, but most of the accompaniment to modern sushi is in fact horseradish---mashed, colored, and called something it's not.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect they do it to annoy. One knows, after all, that they lead lives of their own: plant the lily bulb in the center of the bed and watch it come up under a brick near the edge; pull up a sick little bush and throw it on the compost heap, and ten to one, it will obstinately revive. Usually, though, gardening failures, like airplane crashes, are the result of 'human error', of not reading the directions or paying attention.”
― Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden

“As early humans moved about, they were accompanied by a whole entourage of creatures they had come to depend on, or learned to coexist with — not only their crop plants and domesticated animals, which they carried with them deliberately, but also the creatures that had adopted them during their lengthy process of developing agriculture and animal husbandry and building habitations and cities, roads and canals, seaports and fortifications. To quote Anderson [Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life:]

‘Unconsciously as well as deliberately man carries whole floras about the globe with him, he now lives surrounded by transported landscapes, and our commonest everyday plants have been transformed by their long associations with us so that many roadsides and dooryard plants are artifacts. An artifact, by definition, is something produced by man, something which we would not have if man had not come into being. That is what many of our weeds and crops really are.”
― Richard Orlando, Weeds in the Urban Landscape: Where They Come from, Why They're Here, and How to Live with Them