Quote

I like muddling things up and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.

Vita Sackville-West

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Vita Sackville-West
Age: 70 †
Born: 1892
Born: March 9
Died: 1962
Died: June 2
Author
Biographer
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Knole House
Knole
Lady Victoria Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West
Lady Nicolson
Victoria Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West
V. Sackville-West
Right
Borders
Long
Anywhere
Things
Grow
Muddling
Like
Grows
Herb
Nice
Herbs
Art
Border
Anything
Gardening
Looks
Surely

More quotes by Vita Sackville-West

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I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.
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The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.
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A good start in life is as important to plants as it is to children: they must develop strong roots in a congenial soil, otherwise they will never make the growth that will serve them richly according to their needs in their adult life.
Vita Sackville-West
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April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.
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There are no signposts in the sea.
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Not seeing is half-believing.
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I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.
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There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding...
Vita Sackville-West
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Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.
Vita Sackville-West
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There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree
Vita Sackville-West
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Violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive - none of it very subtle: Ethel [Smyth] didn't deal in pastel shades, she went for the stronger colors, the blood-red, anything deep and pumping out of the arteries of the heart.
Vita Sackville-West
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But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.
Vita Sackville-West
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Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.
Vita Sackville-West
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Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.
Vita Sackville-West
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For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.
Vita Sackville-West
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I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.
Vita Sackville-West
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Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn't care deeply.
Vita Sackville-West
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It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
Vita Sackville-West
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that pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body - durable not even in memory!
Vita Sackville-West
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The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation an ornament, not a necessity, of life.
Vita Sackville-West