When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.
Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love!
If I'm in the country, my big idea is to do nothing. It means talking, it means cooking with the leftovers in the fridge - l'art d'accommoder les restes - it means gardening.
The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.
I put quite a few trees in last autumn. A lot of silver birch and a couple of native trees - just generally doing gardening, putting plants in and hedges in. It takes quite a lot of time and I love it.
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
There is a direct correlation between gardening and mental health, not just to maintain good mental health but to repair it as well - that's anything in the gamut from depression to serious brain damage, schizophrenia or autism.
From plants that wake when others sleep, from timid jasmine buds that keep their odour to themselves all day, but when the sunlight dies away let the delicious secret out to every breeze that roams about.
From my earliest memories, I loved the farm. My grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine and had a huge, well kept garden with an octagonal chicken house in the corner.
I love Michel Roux, Jr., and James Martin - the chefs who are experts in their own right, like Rick Stein on fish. But I don't watch them very much because I don't think it's fair for my husband to be in a total food environment all the time! So we watch programmes about gardening more.
I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.
Clarity is the most important thing. I can compare clarity to pruning in gardening. You know, you need to be clear. If you are not clear, nothing is going to happen. You have to be clear. Then you have to be confident about your vision. And after that, you just have to put a lot of work in.
The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.
I don't think about being the Colin Firth of the gardening world. I live a very insular world based around my family and my home, and to them I'm not the Colin Firth of anything.
No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
Gardening is inevitably a process of constant, remorseless change. It is the constancy of that process that is so comforting, not any fixed moment.
Cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books are guilty pleasures and useful time fillers.
We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
