A Garden’s Beauty

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby.

To suffer is not enough.

We must also be in touch with the wonders of life. They are within us and around us, everywhere, any time.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

 

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.

To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.

– Alfred Austin

Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized.

– Allan Armitage

 

A garden is a grand teacher.

It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.

– Gertrude Jekyll

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

– May Sarton

 

Eden is that old-fashioned house

we dwell in everyday

without suspecting our abode

until we drive away.

– Emily Dickinson

He who plants a garden plants happiness.

If you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden.

Chinese proverb

 

We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. 

And to take good care of it, we have to know it. 

And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.

– Wendell Berry

 

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum,

and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do,

we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

– Michael Pollan

 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

– Greek proverb

The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.

– Abraham Lincoln

 

I like gardening — it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

– Alice Sebold

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry.

Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

– Edna Ferber

 

We are exploring together.

We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun.

The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives.

– Parker J. Palmer

 

Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible.

– Anne Wareham

You can spend your whole life traveling around the world searching for the Garden of Eden, or you can create it in your backyard.

– Khang Kijarro Nguyen

 

I don’t want to return to the world outside these Gardens.

All I want is to notice the dew on a leaf.

The holy busyness of worms in the soil.

– Tor Udall

The garden is a kind of sanctuary.

– John Berger

 

I’d love to see a new form of social security … everyone taught how to grow their own; fruit and nut trees planted along every street, parks planted out to edibles, every high rise with a roof garden, every school with at least one fruit tree for every kid enrolled.

– Jackie French

These photos are the result of a leisurely, late afternoon spent wandering through the Denver Botanical Garden in early September.