I’m really quite simple. I don’t want to be in the business full time, because I’m a gardener. I plant flowers and watch them grow. I don’t go out to clubs. I don’t party. I stay at home and watch the river flow.

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, no culture comparable to that of the garden...But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

"I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs himself into the earth and leaves the sight of what is on it to us gaping good-for-nothings. He lives buried in the ground. He builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say: "Good Lord, what humus!

I very much consider the Internet a garden, and I'm a gardener, and I plant things in it and I work within the framework of the soil, the seasons, the climate, and the temperature, to produce plants.

Gardening is not a rational act.

true plantsman knows, gardening is far from laissez-faire. In their book The Gardens of Democracy, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that moving from ‘machinebrain’ to ‘gardenbrain’ thinking calls for a simultaneous shift away from believing that things will self-regulate to realising that things need stewarding. ‘To be a gardener is not to let nature take its course; it is to tend,’ they write. ‘Gardeners don’t make plants grow but they do create conditions where plants can thrive and they do make judgments about what should and shouldn’t be in the garden.’46 That is why economic gardeners must throw themselves in, nurturing, selecting, repotting, grafting, pruning and weeding the plants as they grow and mature.

My garden will never make me famous. I'm a horticultural ignoramus. I can't tell a string-bean from a soybean, or even a girl bean from a boy bean

Gardening is not something to get on your high horse about or be overwhelmed by. Either you enjoy it or you don't.

Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel has made him just a gardner.

Professional gardeners are usually rather earthy uncommunicative men with a deliberate manner, a slight stoop and the dull-fish-like eye of the confirmed pessimist.

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

I am not an ornithologist — I am a bird.

For many years it has been my habit to divide gardeners into three classes. These are professional gardeners, professional amateur gardeners, and amateur amateur gardeners.