Life in the Garden Quotes

“Gardening has this embracing quality in that it colours the way you look at the world.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“Anthropomorphism is unavoidable, I am finding, in writing about gardening: weeds don't just grow, they grow with intent, they grow aggressively. Well, they do, as any gardener knows. They sneak in and swarm up when your back is turned.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“It does seem odd now, this early-twentieth-century view that social status made one kind of physical activity—work, you could call it—acceptable and another very much not. Gardening, you get a lot hotter and dirtier than you do dusting a room or washing a floor. But gardening was a genteel occupation, housework a demeaning task that you paid someone else to do.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“The garden—any garden—is in a state of unstoppable change. Each day, each week, each leaf, each bud, each flower—moving inexorably on to its next incarnation, the spring sparkle forgotten by the time of the summer show, that too fallen away before smoldering autumn. Then dead of winter, but one determined rose with a flower at Christmas.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“They make extravagant use of gardens, do artists, they individualize them—a Monet garden is a world away from a Van Gogh garden—the garden may shape their work, but their gardens also shape our perception of the garden, of plants and flowers, so that, once seen, a particular painting will forever influence our own vision: reality is affected by metaphor.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“The urge to garden transcends social circumstance, which accounts for the allotment movement, of which more later, and the floral energy of small front gardens up and down the land.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“So far as I am concerned the difference between men and women is that men are interested in cutting grass and women are not. I actually prefer a daisy-sprinkled lawn; Jack, of course, wanted meticulous stripes.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden