These short garden quotes, jokes, and puns range from funny to heartfelt. Browse the list and see which ones become your new favorites.
If want a quote to hang in your garden, also see these 60 Garden Sign Ideas—Funny, Sweet, & Practical.
Garden Quotes: Funny & Meaningful
Garden and nature-inspired quotes have been shared for centuries. Some capture the funny side of life while others touch on the more sentimental we can all relate to.
If you are looking for humor, I started with funny or lighthearted sayings—some of them are quite cheeky—along with some garden riddles and puns.
You’ll also find a selection of more introspective quotes from various writers, gardeners, and poets.
Contents
Need A Name For Your Garden?
Funny or Lighthearted
Gardening is cheaper than therapy. Until your spouse adds up the receipts.
~Empress of Dirt
Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.
~Jean Jacques Rousseau
All gardeners know better than other gardeners.
~Chinese Proverb
A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.
~Doug Larson
You know you’re a gardener when you’re happy to devote three months of your life growing tomatoes to save $1.27.
~Unknown
I am a gardener. What’s your superpower?
~Empress of Dirt
Want a Garden Superpower t-shirt?
Gardening requires lots of water—most of it in the form of perspiration.
~Lou Erickson
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
~Unknown
Money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy plants, and that’s the same thing.
~Unknown
I’ve always was afraid of gardening. But then I decided to grow a pear.
~Unknown
Plant carrots in January and you’ll never have to eat carrots.
~Unknown
Housework is for people who don’t know how to garden.
~Unknown
The philosopher who said that work well done never needs doing over never weeded a garden.
~Ray Everson
When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
~Unknown
When the going gets tough, the tough get growing.
~Empress of Dirt
May whispers, ‘Plant it all!’ and June says, ‘Well, that was ambitious.’
~Empress of Dirt
Garden Jokes & Puns
What’s a gardener’s favorite Beatles song?
Lettuce bee.
Why did the trees need to take a nap?
For rest.
Does anyone know a good place where I can buy a fern?
Asking for a frond.
With fronds like these, who needs anemones?
What do you get when you cross a four-leaf clover with poison ivy?
A rash of good luck.
What’s small, red, and whispers?
A hoarse radish.
What do you call a bee that is hard to understand?
A mumble bee.
What do you call a French baker’s favorite flower?
Croissanthemum.
I wasn’t all that interested in gardening, but I planted a few seeds, and it grew on me.
I used to make lots of money clearing leaves from gardens.
I was raking it in.
Why should you avoid arguing with a cactus?
Too many great points.
How do trees use Facebook?
They log in.
What do you call a plain potato that talks a lot?
A common-tator.
What’s the most popular dating app for trees?
Timber.
Someone added soil to my allotment.
The plot thickens….
Which vegetable should you never take on a boat?
Leeks.
Garden Life Lessons
Don’t miss out on the garden because you found a flaw in the gate.
~James @Speedco (YouTube)
Right plant, right place.
~Beth Chatto
You can bury any number of headaches in the garden.
~Charles Barnard (1889) Read more about Charles here
Without flowers, there would be no us.
~Anonymous
Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years.
~Unknown
I like gardening. It’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
~Alice Sebold | Get free printable here
Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.
~Rudyard Kipling
When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden.
~Minnie Aumonier
Do not spread the compost on the weeds.
~William Shakespeare, Hamlet
When gardeners garden, it is not just plants that grow, but the gardeners themselves.
~Ken Druse
The more I garden the less I know, but the more pleasure I get from it.
~Monty Don
Nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished.
~Unknown
I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.
~Martha Smith
If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.
~Robert Brault
In nature, nothing exists alone.
~Rachel Carson
The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.
~Monty Don
To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
~Mahatma Gandhi
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect.
~Alice Walker
A garden is a silent, loyal friend and a great listener.
~Empress of Dirt
Despite the gardener’s best intentions, Nature will improvise.
~Michael Garofalo
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
~Alfred Austin
It’s amazing how many worries are lost while gardening.
~Empress of Dirt
Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint and the soil and sky as canvas.
~Elizabeth Murray
If you don’t have failure, you don’t why things are succeeding.
~Monty Don
A person of words and not deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
~Unknown
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.
~Henry David Thoreau
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
~Aristotle
I like gardening—it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
~Alice Sebold
Nature bestows her own, richest gifts
And, with lavish hands, she works in shifts.
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham
Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere….
Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.
~Olivia Lang
My garden has been my pleasure, and a daily recreation since the spring opened for planting… Every plant one tends he falls in love with, and gets the glad response for all his attentions and pains. Books, persons even, are for the time set aside — studies and the pen. — Only persons of perennial genius attract or recreate as the plants, and of books we may say the same, as of the magic of solitude.
~Bronson Alcott
My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant’s point of view.
~H. Fred Dale
A garden is like a river. It flows, it’s always moving, and it’s never the same. It never reaches anywhere other than this moment.
~Monty Don
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility.
~Wendell Berry
Make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit the plan.
~Charles Sprague Sargeant
Producing quality compost is the most important job on the organic farm. A lot of the problems I see on farms I visit could be solved by making better compost.
~Eliot Coleman
We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
~Thomas Fuller
Teach a person to sow and they grow for a lifetime.
~Empress of Dirt
Quality is not an act. It is a habit.
~Aristotle
Grow nothing that does not want to be there.
~Monty Don
In the presence of flowers, even the heaviest heart can find a moment of lightness.
~Empress of Dirt
A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
~Eudora Welty
Hummingbirds may be small, but their journeys are a testament to nature’s boundless determination.
~Empress of Dirt
The best garden dreams start while the winter garden slumbers.
~Empress of Dirt
A book is a garden carried in the pocket.
~ Anonymous
There are 1.4 billion insects per person on this planet and we need (almost) every one of them.
~National Geographic
If you plant for specialist species, you’ll cover all bases because generalists can use those plants too.
~Rhonda Fleming Hayes
60 Plants Butterflies Must Have to Survive
I often think the more I limit myself to a small area, the more novelties and discoveries I make in natural history.
— Mary Treat, Home Studies in Nature (1885)
via the book, The Urban Naturalist
Seasonal
Spring
Nature bestows her own, richest gifts
And, with lavish hands, she works in shifts.
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham
Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.
~Ellis Peters
March leads the parade, but April decides if we march through mud or snow.
~Empress of Dirt
To be interested in the changing seasons is… a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
~George Santayana
In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.
~Mark Twain
Spring doesn’t just thaw the earth—it thaws the gardener’s soul, one warm breeze at a time.
~Empress of Dirt
Nesting season is nature’s renewal—every twig, song, and hatchling a reminder that the future depends on safe spaces to grow.
~Empress of Dirt
Spring equinox: the sun says, “Let’s even this out.”
~Empress of Dirt
I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose, I would always greet it in a garden.
~Ruth Stout
Summer
My favorite season is when the mosquitoes are too cold to bite.
~Anonymous
Fall
I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.
~Nathanial Hawthorne
October is a symphony of permanence and change.
~Bonaro W. Overstreet
Peering from some high window, at the gold of November sunset and feeling that if day has to become night, this is a beautiful way.
~ee cummings
In November, the earth is growing quiet. It is making its bed, a winter bed for flowers and small creatures.
~Cynthia Rylant
November at its best—with a sort of delightful menace in the air.
~Anne Bosworth Greene
Winter
Winter has frozen my heart. I can’t wait to drink a glass of spring.
~Bhuwan Thapaliya
Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
~Stanley Horowitz
In the stillness of winter, creativity awakens.” ~ Anonymous
February is the shortest month, so if you’re having a miserable month, try to schedule it for February.
~Lemony Snicket
There is no bad weather. Only bad clothes! ~ ~Norwegian saying
The best gardens start in January’s quiet planning. ~Empress of Dirt
Winter always wins, but a clever gardener knows how to negotiate the terms. ~Empress of Dirt
Groundhog Day: when a rodent with a shadow becomes the world’s most overqualified meteorologist.
~Empress of Dirt
Life Lessons
Worrying does not take away tomorrow’s troubles. It takes away today’s peace.
~Randy Armstrong
Never take criticism from someone you wouldn’t also trust advice from.
~Empress of Dirt
If you are in a bad mood go for a walk.
If you are still in a bad mood go for another walk.
~Hippocrates
Do what you want to do and don’t tell other people how to behave. To make rules for other people—I just don’t get it.
~Ruth Stout | Read interview with Ruth Stout here.
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
~William Black
Make beautiful things whether or not anyone other than you cares.
~Anonymous
It does not matter how fast you are going if you are travelling in the wrong direction.
~Anonymous
A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.
~Anonymous
Not everything that belongs to the past can find a home in the future.
~Anonymous
Every hour is a blank page, and how we fill it is the story we end up living.
~Anonymous
More Quotes
- Garden Wisdom With Monty Don
- Charles Barnard: Victorian Era Urban Gardener
- Alice Sebold: Free Printable Quote
- Van Gogh Nature Quote
- The Only Summer Garden Checklist You’ll Ever Need (Quote)
- I am a gardener. What’s your superpower? (Quote)
~Melissa the Empress of Dirt ♛
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