“To plant and maintain a flower border, with a good scheme for colour, is by no means the easy thing that is commonly supposed.”
~ Gertrude Jekyll
“Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty...A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.”
~ Vita Sackville-West
“Good bones are important, so it is wise to go slowly and get your plan right before launching into a vital project.”
~ Rosemary Verey
“Even the most irresistible flowering plant, one that I call a ‘key’ performer, is part of a whole cast; it has to be considered as a component in an overall look as well as for its individual charms.”
~ Penelope Hobhouse
“Designing the garden is like learning to speak. You begin with odd words – learning the individual plants. Then you create a simple phrase, finding two or three plants that look well together, next comes a sentence and finally the complete story.”
~ Beth Chatto
“Structure is the most important component in a successful planting; colour is important too but it is a secondary consideration.”
~ Piet Oudolf
“We should not feel separate from nature, we are a part of it. We need to cover our footprints.”
~ Dan Pearson
“More than ever, we need...spaces for discovery, repose, and privacy in our increasingly bewildering, spiritually impoverished, overstuffed, and under maintained garden Earth.”
~ Peter Walker
“I like to see and understand a space, to hear everyone’s point of view in order to respond to many different needs.”
~ Martha Schwartz
“All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
“To plant is but a part of landscape composition; to co-ordinate is all.”
~ Christopher Tunnard
“Simplicity, tranquility, and clarity are the underlying baselines of my best work, and the belief that a garden can be a work of art.”
~ Ted Smyth
“Designing a landscape is about connecting the body, soul and mind to the land itself.”
~ Kathryn Gustafson
“Any tendency to design for design’s sake, to create a pattern within which the owner must live according to rules set by the designer, is headed for frustration, if not disaster.”
~ Thomas Church
“My pre-occupation is with the relationship between objects, whether I am dealing with woods, fields or water, rocks or trees, shrubs and plants, or groups of plants.”
~ Russell Page
“The thing that’s important is not something called design; it’s how you live, its life itself. Design really comes from that. You cannot separate what you do from your life.”
~ Dan Kiley
“When I am designing, my aim is to create tension and then gradually proceed into quiet.”
~ Jacques Wirtz
“A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist’s outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.”
~ Roberto Burle Marx
“A garden scheme should have a backbone – a central idea beautifully phrased.”
~ Edwin Lutyens
“...a garden is fundamentally a place for use by people. It is not a static picture created in plants...”
~ John Brookes
“Gardening...demands a certain attitude. It is necessary to accept the dynamism of vegetation with serenity.”
~ Gilles Clement
