One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth. ~ Dorothy Frances Gurney

Gardens are planned spaces, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The garden can incorporate both natural and man-made materials. The most common form today is known as a residential garden, but the term garden has traditionally been a more general one. Zoos, which display wild animals in simulated natural habitats, were formerly called zoological gardens. Western gardens are almost universally based on plants, with garden often signifying a shortened form of botanical garden.

Quotes

We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. ~ Eve

Sorted alphabetically by author or source

• Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
  • Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Chapter 16

• Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, nihil deerit.
  • If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
  • Cicero, Ad Familiares IX, 4, to Varro.

• We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
  • Eve, to the Serpent in Genesis 3:2-3 (KJV).

• It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the tangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. In the great legend of the Fall the spiritual disaster of Man is symbolised by his exclusion from a garden, and the moral tragedy of modern industrialism is only the repetition of that ancient fable. Man lost his garden, and with it that tranquillity of soul that is found in gardens.
  • Alfred George Gardiner (writing as "Alpha of the Plough"), "A Vanished Garden", Leaves in the Wind (1920)

• Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
  And half the platform just reflects the other.
  The suff'ring eye inverted nature sees,
  Trees cut in statues, statues thick as trees;
  With here a fountain never to be play'd,
  And there a summer-house that knows no shade.
  • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), Epistle IV, line 117.

• Come into the garden, Maud,
  For the black bat, night, has flown.
  • Alfred Tennyson, Maud; A Monodrama (1855), XXII. 1.

• Once again, I experienced that overwhelming joy in the universe that I had felt in London outside the V and A. But this time, my consciousness of the world seemed larger, more complex. It was the mystic's sensation of oneness, of everything blending into everything else. Everything I looked at reminded me of something else, which also became present to my consciousness, as if I were simultaneously seeing a million worlds and smelling a million scents and hearing a million sounds-- not mixed up, but each separate and clear. I was overwhelmed with a sense of my smallness in the face of this vast, beautiful, objective universe, this universe whose chief miracle is that it exists, as well as myself. It is no dream, but a great garden in which life is trying to obtain a foothold. I experienced a desire to burst into tears of gratitude; then I controlled it, and the feeling subsided into a calm sense of immense, infinite beauty.
  • Colin Wilson in The Philosopher's Stone, p. 237-238 (1967)

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