Benefit: Facts on Healthy Soil, Hearty Communities

The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

~Wendell Berry

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.

~Aldo Leopold

All gardens are a form of autobiography.

~Robert Dash

Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature.

~Penelope Hobhouse

Gardens, scholars say, are the first sign of commitment to a community. When people plant corn they are saying, let’s stay here. And by their connection to the land, they are connected to one another.

~Anne Raver

Like people everywhere, and perhaps more than most, city dwellers want and need gardens and growing things.

~Lynden B. Miller

When the soil disappears, the soul disappears.

~Ymber Delecto

The great challenge for the garden designer is not to make the garden look natural, but to make the garden so that the people in it will feel natural.

~Lawrence Halprin

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

~Margaret Atwood

Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men.

~Chinese Proverb

When we learn to call flowers by name we take the first step toward a real intimacy with them.

~Mrs. William Starr Dana

Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than emperors.

~Mary Cantwell

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

~Alfred Austin

For a high minded man agriculture is the best of all occupations.

~Xenophon

Gardens cannot be considered in detachment from the people who make them.

~Derek Clifford

The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.

~Charles Dudley Warner

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing better than they have ever done before.

~Vita Sackville-West

There, with her baskets and spades and clippers, and wearing her funny boyish shoes and with the sunborn sweat soaking her eyes, she is part of the sky and earth, possibly a not too significant part, but a part.

~Truman Capote

To dig and delve in nice, clean dirt
Can do a mortal little hurt.

~John Kendrick Bangs

I never had any other desire so strong and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden.

~Abraham Cowley

“Might I,” quavered Mary, “might I have a bit of earth?”
…Mr. Craven looked quite startled.
“Earth!” he repeated. “What do you mean?”
“To plant seeds in—to make things grow—to see them come alive.”

~Frances Hodgson Burnett

I’ve had enough of gardening—I’m just about ready to throw in the trowel.

~Anonymous

So THAT’S what hay looks like.

~Queen Mary

If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it in a very real sense. “Green fingers” are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart.

~Russell Page

I farm—a kind of painting on earth, a kind of writing on earth—because of the constantly changing patterns I can create with water, seed, soil, sunlight, the weather. The memories of what I have made, the visions of what I hope to bring into existence, and the image of narrow channels of water wanding their way through the back yards of my small valley: these are what most deeply motivate me.

~Stanley Crawford

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

~Erma Bombeck

It is curious, pathetic almost, how deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

~Alexander Smith

There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp.

~John Steinbeck

To take a spade or a spading fork on a crisp fall day and without undue haste or backbreaking effort to turn over slice after slice of sweet-smelling earth can bring rich rewards to the gardener who fully understands just what he is accomplishing.

~T.H. Everett

He who plants a garden, plants happiness.

~Chinese Proverb

The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the whole world.

~Charles Dudley Warner

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch their renewal of life, this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

~Charles Dudley Warner

What I enjoy is not the fruits alone, but I also enjoy the soil itself, its nature and its power.

~Cicero

Working in the garden…gives me a profound feeling of inner peace. Nothing here is in a hurry. There is no rush toward accomplishment, no blowing of trumpets. Here is the great mystery of life and growth. Everything is changing, growing, aiming at something, but silently, unboastfully, taking its time.

~Ruth Stout

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth.

~Thomas Jefferson

I personally like manure. I never feel so affluent as when bringing back the occasional load of high-class dung. When we moved here and I was preparing the new garden, Stu brought a pickup load of horse manure as a garden-warming present. I never had a more welcome or thoughtful gift.

~William Longgood

No poet I’ve ever heard of has written an ode to a load of manure. Somebody should, and I’m not trying to be funny.

~Ruth Stout

One of the most endearing qualities of gardeners, though it makes their gardens worse, is this faculty of being too easily delighted.

~Henry Mitchell

I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I work in the garden.

. ~John Erskine

The only limit to your garden is at the boundaries of your imagination.

~Thomas D. Church

The doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.

~Frank Lloyd Wright

When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson