Essays, Quotations 

Here are over four hundred quotations--not only one-line zingers but stanzas of verse and full paragraphs of narrative--on the endless fascination of gardening. The great gardening writers of past and present are amply represented, but these varied selections also range the entirety of recorded literature, from the Bible and tenth-century Japanese diarist Sei Sh-onagon through Chaucer and Shakespeare to Dickens, Whitman, and even Prince Charles, as well as Jane Austen, Geoffrey Charlesworth, Helena Rutherford Ely, Robert Frost, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ted Hughes, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, and Gertrude Jekyll. "Nature does not hesitate to interfere with me. So I do not hesitate to tamper with it."--Henry Mitchell "The tulips are too excitable."--Sylvia Plath "My garden is an honest place. Every tree and every vine are incapable of concealment, and tell after two or three months exactly what sort of treatment they have had."--Ralph Waldo Emerson "I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."--Willa Cather - from Amzon