To dig one's own spade into one's own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?

A garden is a place for shaping a little world of your own according to your heart's desire.

We both know, you and I, that if all men were gardeners, the world at last would be at peace.

Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Long experience has taught me that people who do not like geraniums have something morally unsound about them. Sooner or later you will find them out you will discover that they drink, or steal books, or speak sharply to cats. Never trust a man or a woman who is not passionately devoted to geraniums.

Do you ever find yourself bursting into a sort of lunatic laughter at the sheer prettiness of things?

It is only to the gardener that time is a friend, giving each year more than he steals.

A gardener is never shut out from his garden, wherever he may be. Its comfort never fails. Though the city may close about him, and the grime and soot descend upon him, he can still wander in his garden, does he but close his eyes.

I had never 'taken a cutting' before ... Do you realize that the whole thing is miraculous? It is exactly as though you were to cut off your wife's leg, stick it in the lawn, and be greeted on the following day by an entirely new woman, sprung from the leg, advancing across the lawn to meet you.

Every moment of this strange and lovely life from dawn to dusk, is a miracle. Somewhere, always a rose is opening its petals to the dawn. Somewhere, always, a flower is fading in the dusk.

As any psychologist will tell you, the worst thing you can possibly do to a woman is to deprive her of a grievance.