Cultivating Delight Quotes

“Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.”
― Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden―Essays on Gardening and Environmental Pleasures

“I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I’ve been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival…how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.
More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden.”
― Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

“I believe in God,’ Frank Lloyd Wright said, "only I spell it Nature." Gardeners spend much of their time kneeling in postures of prayer.”
― Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

“A garden always includes many smaller gardens. Indeed, no garden exists as a single thing. By its nature, it is plural, just as each person is a symposium of cells, or an arch is a strength made from many weaknesses.”
― Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

“Consider the inner garden, that secret glade filled with day dreams, feelings, and memories. Sometimes they can be made physical, a goal of metaphysical gardening. Otherwise they remain mere reflections in a gazing ball.”
― Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

“In class, we identified some elements essential to creativity: risk, perseverance, novel problem solving, disciplined spontaneity, the need to make exterior one’s inner universe, openness to experience, luck, genetics, a willingness to react against the status quo, delight, mastery, the ability to live not only one’s own life but also the life of one’s time, childlike innocence guided by the sophistication of an adult, resourcefulness, a sense of spirituality a mind of large general knowledge fascinated by particulars, passion, the useful application of obsession, a sacred place (abstract or physical), among many others. That all these qualities, and more, might combine to produce what we refer to as a moment of inspiration is one of the great mysteries and triumphs of mind. Our minds grow. Not because we always need them to but because it is their nature, just as it is the nature of flies to seek out open wounds and the nature of flowers to follow the sun.”
― Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

“Few things are begun with as much hope as a garden, and it can disappoint in direct proportion to one’s anticipation.”
― Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

“Can there be a benediction of deer on a chilly spring morning? I think so. Their otherworldliness stops the day in its tracks, focuses it on the hypnotic beauty of nature, and then starts the day again with a rush of wonder. There is a way of sitting quietly and beholding nature which is a form of meditation and prayer, and like those healing acts it calms the spirit.”
― Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden