A New Garden Ethic Quotes

“Ultimately, every garden is an ideology.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“Your garden is a protest. It is a place of defiant compassion.
It is a space to help sustain wildlife and ecosystem function while providing an aesthetic response that moves you. For you, beauty isn’t just petal-deep but goes down into the soil, farther down into the aquifer and back up into the air and for miles around on the backs and legs of insects. You don’t have to see microbes in action, birds eating seeds, butterflies laying eggs, ants farming aphids….Your garden is a protest for all the ways in which we deny our life by denying other lives. Plant some natives. Be defiantly compassionate.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“Of the approximately 93 species of butterfly species in California, --a botanically rich and diverse state—65 species can only reproduce on native plants.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“Gardens have deep meaning when they are created and managed to benefit other species, even other humans….Gardening from a larger-than-human perspective can also be empowering. In this time of climate disruption and mass extinction, gardens are becoming places of activism…”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“Every organism on Earth is here not for us but with us, and the loss of a single species by our hands is an eradication of our own being.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“I don’t see much that is humble or inquisitive in gardens composed of hosta, daylily, barberry, miscanthus, Russian sage, or feather reed grass—plants that have no shared evolutionary history with wildlife anywhere In North America. I don’t see much in the way of compassion, respect, community, mercy or love in gardens composed of plants like this because these gardens are not reaching out to the essential wildness still among us….
….Native plant gardening does not limit your aesthetic choices; it expands your ethical ones.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“Native plants are a threat to an entire Western culture, and an entire industry built foremost on nature as ornamentation for human visual consumption. Native plants represent a gardening paradigm, that instead of focusing solely or primarily on the commercialization of our five senses, explores the deeper issues of why we garden, how we garden and who we garden for.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“We treat plants like pieces of jewelry, fine dresses, and designer shoes…Instead of celebrating plants as part of the global community, highlighting what each can do for life beyond our own visual pleasure, we focus exclusively on a new leaf color or a new bloom….plants are far more than a visual commodity. Simply put plants are not art. What we do with them, how we honor their life processes as part of creating ecological function—that is art.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“In our best moments we are no less than a garden, that serves life, not ourselves.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“Native bees are more efficient pollinators, having a 91 to 72 percent advantage over honey bees…..We’ve been duped by ‘save the bee’ campaigns that show images of European honey bees or graphics of honeycomb. We don’t really need honey bees in North America for pollination. The primary group that needs honey bees is an industrial agriculture system that has come to depend on them; this insect species is one more cog in the industrialization of life that minimizes and destroys ecosystems for profit. We put great stress on these bees, shipping them around the nation, treating them like machine parts with dollar values as their primary worth.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future

“Ninety-six percent of songbirds have young that can only eat insects, and 90 percent of these insect species can only feed on native plants.”
― Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future