In the Garden Quotes

“A gardener's grandmother will have grown such and such a rose, and the smell of that rose at dusk (for flowers always seem to be most fragrant at the end of the day, as if that, smelling, was the last thing to do before going to sleep), when the gardener was a child and walking in the grandmother's footsteps as she went about her business in her garden - the memory of that smell of the rose combined with the memory of that smell of the grandmother's skirt will forever inform and influence the life of the gardener, inside or outside the garden itself.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing

“Of all the benefits that come from having endured childhood (for it is something to which we must submit, no matter how beautiful we find it, no matter how enjoyable it has been), certainly among them will be the garden and the desire to be involved with gardening.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing

“The smallest gardens can be made to perform, to mutate from season to season. I miss the long-gone days of digging a trench for the potatoes, pruning a bed of roses, dividing the irises, but there is immense satisfaction in the intimacy of a restricted area, where no space can be wasted, everything has to be considered, cherished, made to do its best.”
― Penelope Lively, In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing