Perhaps words of wisdom from famous people, books and historians might motivate you to work on the garden. Here are thirty-six of the best gardening quotes and sayings out there and a few sharable graphics to keep the inspiration going on Pinterest, Facebook or your platform of choice.

1. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. -Thomas Jefferson

2. What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

3. Ol’ man Simon, planted a diamond. Grew hisself a garden the likes of none. Sprouts all growin’ comin’ up glowin’ Fruit of jewels all shinin’ in the sun. Colors of the rainbow. See the sun and the rain grow sapphires and rubies on ivory vines, Grapes of jade, just ripenin’ in the shade, just ready for the squeezin’ into green jade wine. -Shel Silverstein

4. The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. –George Bernard Shaw

5. Earth laughs in flowers. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

6. We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses. -Abraham Lincoln

7. All gardeners know better than other gardeners. -Chinese Proverb

8. If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. –Cicero

9. I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess. –Walt Disney

10. Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colors. –Oscar de la Renta

11. Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade. –Rudyard Kipling

12. It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees. –George Eliot

13. A good garden may have some weeds. –Thomas Fuller

14. God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. –Francis Bacon

15. Kiss of the sun for pardon. Song of the birds for mirth. You’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than any place else on earth. –Dorothy Frances Gurney

16. My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. –Claude Monet

17. Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God. –Thomas Jefferson

18. Do not spread the compost on the weeds. -William Shakespeare, Hamlet

19. Gardening is not a rational act. –Margaret Atwood

20. What’s a butterfly garden without butterflies? –Roy Rogers

21. Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same. –Helen Keller

22. Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. –Oscar Wilde

23. One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. –Dale Carnegie

24. On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden. –Maya Angelou

25. Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That’s the fun of them. You’re always learning. –Helen Mirren

26. 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. –Diane von Furstenberg

27. It’s true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else. –Viggo Mortensen

28. 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. –Christian Louboutin

29. My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society. –Andrew Weil

30. To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. –Audrey Hepburn

31. If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere. –Vincent van Gogh

32. Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. -Henry David Thoreau

33. Gardening is a humbling experience. –Martha Stewart

34. Almost every person, from childhood, has been touched by the untamed beauty of wildflowers. –Lady Bird Johnson

35. There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp. –John Steinbeck

36. Look deep into nature, and you will understand everything better. –Albert Einstein

37 (bonus). Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. –Frank Lloyd Wright

38 (bonus). When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. –Georgia O’Keefe

Your Turn…

Are we missing your favorite gardening quote?