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Many of the world’s top gardeners, landscape designers and botanists, both past and present have made memorable contributions with their words, as well as their deeds.
Can you pick who said or wrote the following…?
1. “Many gardeners agree that hand weeding is not the terrible drudgery it is made out to be. Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to develop the plot of their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative’s latest example of unreasonableness.”
2. “If that garden was better than the Telegraph garden, I’m a Dutchman”
3. “He is a botanist, who knows to call similar vegetables with similar names and distinctly different plants with distinctive names, intelligible to everyone.”
4. “I just come and talk to the plants, really – very important to talk to them, they respond I find.”
5. “A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.”
6. “I have lived to see many of my plans beautifully realised, but many more cruelly marred, sometimes by false economy, sometimes by injudicious extravagance. I have also lived to reach that period where the improvement of houses and gardens is more delightful to me than that of parks and forests, landscapes, or distant prospects.”
7. “You see a lot with dead plants. The shapes and forms, the seed heads in contrast with the grasses. When it freezes it looks even better.”
8. “We are interested in forging our own identity and as such are at the forefront of Eurasion-fusion-style landscape design.”
9. “I develop an intimacy with my garden that I foster and nurture. I can see this and so do two million other people.”
10. “If you rolled the clock back 15 years and you asked anyone at my family’s dinner table about growing food or raising poultry, they all would have known something. Now, many families don’t even eat dinner together – much less pass down these valuable skills to younger generations.”
11. “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece”
12. “Gardening is a humbling experience.”
13. “The site was wasteland, a wilderness lying between our farm and our neighbours. It consisted of a long spring-fed hollow where the soil lay black and waterlogged, surrounded by sun-baked gravel, situated in one of the driest parts of the country. But it was the extreme variation in growing conditions which intrigued us, the possibility lying before us of growing…plants adapted by nature to different situations.”
14. “If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and 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.”
15. ” There are a number of phrases in use which express in general terms our longing to live in our site, such as ‘the integration of the house and garden’, ‘indoor-outdoor living’ and ‘the relation of shelter to land’…….It is not a new idea.”
16. “The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.”
17. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
18. “I think it’s great that people want to express their individuality through their gardens, however, the romanticised ideologies attached to this are holding Briton’s back from thinking about the wider issues that face their landscape. By this, I do not mean only the British countryside, but the space “in between” buildings, which is a notion people in Britain struggle with.”
19. “Imagine how it would be if we made love only once after 75 years and died immediately afterwards!” (apropos a palm)
20. “Those gardens that use nature for their romantic gain, but strike that delicate balance between it being invited in and not quite having the upper hand are always in the balance….It is in this balance that I find the most evocative moments, the points where the magic occurs. I suspect that the ephemeral nature of these interludes is the greater part of their appeal, and for me, trying to capture them is part of the art of garden making.”
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