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
When you plant something, you invest in a beautiful future amidst a stressful, chaotic and, at times, downright appalling world.
Interpretation
Planting is a hopeful act that brings beauty to a chaotic world.
This quote emphasizes the act of planting as a metaphor for investing in positive outcomes and beauty in an often stressful and chaotic world. It suggests that even amidst difficulties, creating and nurturing can lead to hopeful and beautiful futures.
In practice
During a community meeting on sustainability, someone shared this quote to inspire collective gardening efforts.
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.
I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.
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.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
We'll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we've lost in the last 65 million years. If we don't find answers to these problems, we're gonna be victims of this extinction event that we're at fault for.
I've been bitten by a python. Not a very big one. I was being silly, saying: 'Oh, it's not poisonous...' Then, wallop! But you have fear around animals.
Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.
Each solstice is a domain of experience unto itself. At the Summer Solstice, all is green and growing, potential coming into being, the miracle of manifestation painted large on the canvas of awareness. At the Winter Solstice, the wind is cold, trees are bare and all lies in stillness beneath blankets of snow.
I feel like the earth, astonished at fragrance borne in the air, made pregnant with mystery from a drop of rain.
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