I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.
Monty DonRead
I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.
Interpretation
Gardening embodies a vision for the future, offering deep spiritual fulfillment through the slow process of nurturing life.
In this quote, Monty Don expresses the idea that gardening is not just a hobby but a profound engagement with the future. It emphasizes the slow and patient nature of gardening, where each action taken today has a ripple effect that can lead to future growth and beauty, while also providing spiritual rewards that nourish the gardener's soul.
In practice
Sharing this quote at a gardening club meeting to inspire members.
I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.
Sweet peas should smell. Half the point of growing sweet peas is to cut them for the house; they should fill a room with an almost painful olfactory inarticulateness. But most sweet peas smell of nothing. This does not stop them being beautiful, but they are like food with no flavour.
Gardening is inevitably a process of constant, remorseless change. It is the constancy of that process that is so comforting, not any fixed moment.
I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man's-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.
I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn't make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.
I have learnt that gardens are like happiness: you cannot pursue them as an absolute thing or moment.
Tis like the birthday of the world,_x000D_ _x000D_ When earth was born in bloom;_x000D_ _x000D_ The light is made of many dyes,_x000D_ _x000D_ The air is all perfume:_x000D_ _x000D_ There's crimson buds, and white and blue,_x000D_ _x000D_ The very rainbow showers_x000D_ _x000D_ Have turned to blossoms where they fell,_x000D_ _x000D_ And sown the earth with flowers.
I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.
When one looks at Nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it takes on a deeper significance than when one stands outside. More of Nature is thus expressed - it becomes part of a greater whole.
This Forest eats itself and lives forever.
Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
There is continual spring, and harvest there Continual, both meeting at one time: For both the boughs do laughing blossoms bear, And with fresh colours deck the wanton prime, And eke attonce the heavy trees they climb, Which seem to labour under their fruits load: The whiles the joyous birds make their pastime Amongst the shady leaves, their sweet above, And their true loves without suspicion tell abroad.
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