35 Inspiring Gardening Quotes to Encourage You to Grow Plants

Given the sustainability and environmental themes of this platform, it is no secret that here at EWP we are a bunch of gardening enthusiasts. At HQ, we grow herbs, regrow food from scraps, care for houseplants, decorate our office with indoor plants, grow seedlings in a greenhouse, are building a second greenhouse, are creating a permaculture garden and at the time of writing, grow more than 60 varieties of annual and perennial plants and flowers, fruit, vegetables, nuts, trees and medicinal plants.

In honour of our obsession with horticulture, we’ve curated some of the best and most inspiring gardening quotes and words of wisdom about plants, to encourage you to cultivate your own indoor or outdoor garden and connect with the wonder that is Mother Nature.

1. “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” — Audrey Hepburn

2. “Gardening is a work of a lifetime: you never finish.” — Oscar de la Renta

3. “Anyone who has time for drama is not gardening enough.” — Anonymous

4. “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” — Chinese proverb

5. “To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” — Mahatma Gandhi

6. “When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden.” — Minnie Aumonier

7. “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.” — Claude Monet

8. “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

9. “No single sort of garden suits everyone. Shut your eyes and dream of the garden you’d most love then open your eyes and start planting. Loved gardens flourish, boring ones are hard work.” — Jackie French

10. “If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.” — Robert Brault

11. “Gardening is cheaper than therapy – and you get tomatoes.” — Anonymous

12. “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” — Greek proverb

13. “Gardening is the greatest tonic and therapy a human being can have. Even if you have only a tiny piece of earth, you can create something beautiful, which we all have a great need for. If we begin by respecting plants, it’s inevitable we’ll respect people.” — Audrey Hepburn

14. “You are also far less likely to waste food when you have nurtured it from a seed into a plant.” — Darina Allen

15. “Life begins the day you start a garden.” — Chinese proverb

16. “The garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature.” — Jeff Cox

17. “To create a garden is to search for a better world. In our effort to improve on nature, we are guided by a vision of paradise. Whether the result is a horticultural masterpiece or only a modest vegetable patch, it is based on the expectation of a glorious future. This hope for the future is at the heart of all gardening.” — Marina Schinz

18. “Gardening adds years to your life, and life to your years.” — Unknown

19. “Watching something grow is good for morale. It helps us believe in life.” — Myron Kaufmann

20. “The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.” — Gertrude Jekyll

21. “Plan a garden for the future, but expect it to evolve and need changing, despite your well laid-out plans. Such is the temperament of Mother Nature.” — Meredith Kirton

22. “There are no happier folks than plant lovers and none more generous than those who garden.” — Ernest Wilson

23. “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” — Aristotle

24. “The healing of the land and the purification of the human spirit is the same process.” — Masanobu Fukuoka

25. “All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.” — Chinese proverb

26. “Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.” — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

27. “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero

28. “Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.” — Sigmund Freud

29. “A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” — Liberty Hyde Bailey

30. “All gardening is landscape painting.” — William Kent

31. “Despite the gardener’s best intentions, Nature will improvise.” — Michael P. Garofalo

32. “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

33. “Giving up your ego is the shortest way to unification with nature.” — Masanobu Fukuoka

34. “A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.” — Liberty Hyde Bailey

35. “Gardens are a form of autobiography.” — Sydney Eddison

36. “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