“For the last forty years of my life I have broken my back, my finger-nails, and sometimes my heart in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.”
VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

“If gardening doesn’t teach us anything else it should teach us faith. All the time we are shivering and complaining, nature is working miracles underground. I die a thousand deaths until I see my friends coming back to greet me, …safe and sound.”
MARGERY FISH

“If only one were as good a gardener in practise as one is in theory, what a garden one would create!”
VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

“Instant gardening is no more satisfying to the soul than thirty-second snatches of Mozart, condensed novels or fast food.”
ANNA PAVORD

“Although I have been gardening for fifty-six years…I can still feel daunted by the sight of a large empty space waiting to be transformed.”
BETH CHATTO

“Few things are more pleasurable than planting. As you push the soil around the roots and stand back to admire, you see not the twig or the tiny nub of growth now almost covered by the mulch around it, but a future lived out in growth.”
DAN PEARSON

“There are only two things I can make, gardens and tea.”
MIEN RUYS

“There is no beginning and no end to a garden, it is a set of processes, not a product. This is what I love; this complex, interdependent evolution where you need to employ everything you have – experience, a little knowledge, craft, science, art and, wherever you can, a dash of poetry. Not to mention a lot of luck.”
CAROL KLEIN

“Just as memories are a resource, so the garden is a resource. It is a repository of beauty – something to turn to when tired and empty. It gives back much more than it takes.”
SUE STUART-SMITH

“Humility and the most patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to something better.”
ELIZABETH VON ARNIM

“Some people think that the word ‘design’ is a little too pretentious and would rather their garden ‘evolve’ over the years so that, by trial and error, its character and that of the owner are revealed in a natural progression. However you like to describe the process, it is still design…it just takes much longer to see the results.”
CLEVE WEST