Garden Design Quotes

A garden without its statue is like a sentence without its verb. ~ Joseph Beach

The tragedy of feminine design is that it receives so little official support. Most of the world's design schools, having been organized by men, encourage a masculine approach, even when they are run by women. Yet many designers who are male in the biological sense have a feminine approach to design. ~ Tom Turner

From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate. ~ Tom Turner

Charles Jencks is the most notable landscape and garden designer to carry forward the 3500 BCE-1800CE landscape and garden design agenda. ~ Tom Turner

If the art of gardening is at last to turn back from her extravagances and rest with her other sisters, it is, above everything, necessary to have clearly before you what you require ... It is certainly tasteless and inconsistent to desire to encompass the world with a garden-wall, but very practicable and reasonable to make a garden ... into a characteristic whole to the eye, heart, and nderstanding alike. ~ Friedrich Schiller

The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context. ~ Tom Turner

The flat area immediately below was broken up into a formal pattern of beds containing oleander and more clipped clouds of box, a southern imitation of the grand parterres of aristocratic chateaux. A rose garden beyond was the first in a series of gardens created on descending levels, apparently linked by a magnificently overgrown wisteria. Dense lines of cypress hid any farther areas from view, including the memorial garden that was her special brief. As a whole, the garden was charming, luxuriant, but- from a professional point of view- dilapidated. ~ Deborah Lawrenson

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 Haden Church

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

A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape. ~ William Shenstone

Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere. ~ Tom Turner

British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology. ~ Tom Turner

I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years. ~ Danielle Dutton

Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition. ~ Tom Turner

Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature. ~ Penelope Hobhouse

Humphry Repton, the leading garden theorist of the nineteenth century, defined a garden as 'a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure or man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated and enriched by art'. ~ Tom Turner

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. ~ Marianne Moore

There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished. A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move. ~ Mirabel Osler

When I am designing, my aim is to create tension and then gradually proceed into quiet. ~ Jacques Wirtz

There is much to learn about what could happen in the gardens of the future, should designers wish to learn about the past. ~ Tom Turner

Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything. ~ Tom Turner

The best way to garden is to put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and some old clothes. And with a hoe in one hand and a cold drink in the other, tell somebody else where to dig. ~ Texas Bix Bender

Albine now yielded to him, and Serge possessed her.
And the whole garden was engulfed together with the couple in one last cry of love's passion. The tree-trunks bent as under a powerful wind. The blades of grass emitted sobs of intoxication. The flowers, fainting, lips half-open, breathed out their souls. The sky itself, aflame with the setting of the great star, held its clouds motionless, faint with love, whence superhuman rapture fell. And it was the victory of all the wild creatures, all plants and all things natural, which willed the entry of these two children into the eternity of life. ~ Emile Zola

We should not feel separate from nature, we are a part of it. We need to cover our footprints. ~ Dan Pearson

Designing is always on the mind of a designer, and as I was saying it's a sort of digestive process, so I usually keep it to myself unless I'm collaborating with someone because explaining all the things that are going on in your head can be quite exhausting, especially in the early stages of a project. ~ Christian Louboutin

... words have been all my life, all my life
this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out
the silk is her life, her home, her safety
her food and drink too
and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew ... . ~ A.S. Byatt

Her name is Lysandra Keates, and she arrived uninvited on my doorstep a few days ago. I do not know the particulars of her situation as of yet, but my impression is that she is in dire straits. She has begged me to match her with a man." "I am not looking for a mistress!" Andrew snapped, but he couldn't help a brief, powerful image of the girl in the garden…in his bed, her legs wrapped around him as he drove into her. ~ Jess Michaels

There's always time to do things that you're passionate about ... If my name helps get something out there that I believe in then I am going to produce it ... Design is really my true love. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city's highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you. Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy. ~ Zadie Smith

The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil. ~ John Steinbeck

In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture - it won't accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy' time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

The girl who, twenty-four years ago to the day, stepped into my life with her big brown eyes, her hair in pigtails, sucking on a lollipop as she stared across at me through the garden fence and said, "I'm Trudy, you want a lollipop?" I let out a laugh as tears fill my eyes, realizing today's date is August 31. The day Jake and I met. ~ Samantha Towle

If design is to be ecologically responsible, it must be independent of concern for the gross national product. ~ Victor Papanek

They say that gardens look better when they are created by loving gardeners rather than by landscapers, because the garden is more tended to and cared for. The same thing goes for cooking. I only cook for people I love. ~ Ina Garten

If we reduce human beings to being simply physical - as Western thought is prone to do - our poverty-alleviation efforts will tend to focus on material solutions. But if we remember that humans are spiritual, social, psychological, and physical beings, our poverty-alleviation efforts will be more holistic in their design and execution. ~ Steve Corbett

Why should existence be arranged so that our alienation from God is a given and we must forever fight our way not simply toward what he is but toward the whole notion that he is? If you let go of the literal creation story as it comes down to us through Genesis, if you let go of the Garden of Eden, the intellectual apple, the whole history of man's separation from God tied to the tongue of a talking snake; if you let go of these things - and who but a child could hold on to them - then you are left, paradoxically, with a child's insistent question: Why? ~ Christian Wiman

That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover. ~ Freeman Dyson

You cannot not communicate. ~ Paul Watzlawick

Don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor. ~ Beatrix Potter

A new institution with new design, structure, body, soul, new thinking, and direction will replace the Planning Commission. It will be one that caters to the aspirations of 21st century India. ~ Narendra Modi

Take care when wandering about,
in the wilds of the valley and heights of jagged rock.
What a horrific garden of wonderland we have stumbled into;
where a turn of one's heel can lead to flowering jubilation,
and another leads to the twisted and thorny thicket of despair.... ~ Kate Cullen

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits ~ William Carlos Williams

In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Actions rare and sudden do commonly proceed from fierce necessity, of else from some oblique design, which is ashamed to show itself in the public road. ~ William Davenant

Goal setting is good stewardship. Instead of letting things happen, goals help us make things happen. Instead of living by default, goals help us live by design. Instead of living out of memory, goals help us live out of imagination. ~ Mark Batterson

For two years nobody talked about anything other than the name arrangement. There was no fund-raising and no progress being made on construction and design. ~ Michael Arad

It may be just one facet of your personality, or it may not even be a facet but only a pretension. You can show this false face with no problem when sometimes you meet on a sea beach, sometimes in a garden, sometimes under the moon and the stars, but when you really start living together then the reality starts surfacing. The real person is a hell and all that sweet talk that had happened under the stars becomes just lies. ~ Rajneesh

If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. My policies are simple. I'm willing to sign any nuclear non-proliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that's going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag. ~ Arundhati Roy

Thankfully for frustrated women around the world, Tom Schalk, the vice president of voice technology at car navigation system supplier ATX, has come up with a novel solution to fix the 'many issues with women's voices'.26 What women need, he said, was 'lengthy training' – if only women 'were willing' to submit to it. Which, sighs Schalk, they just aren't. Just like the wilful women buying the wrong stoves in Bangladesh, women buying cars are unreasonably expecting voice-recognition software developers to design a product that works for them when it's obvious that the problem needing fixing is the women themselves. Why can't a woman be more like a man? ~ Caroline Criado Perez

Design is not art. Design is utilitarian, art is not. ~ Massimo Vignelli

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden. ~ Voltaire

The woman in us still prosecutes a deceit like that begun in the garden. ~ Joseph Glanvill

Success is not fame or money or the power to bewitch. it is to have created something valuable from your own individuality and skill a garden, an embroidery, a painting, a cake, a life. ~ Charlotte Gray

A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Where is your water? Know your garden. ~ Hopi Teaching

She was a walking deposition to every encounter that fed a dark hunger for confrontation. ~ The Fly Garden, 2017 Facebook

I have been called an eco-designer simply because I use wood. But I am not an eco-designer, nor does the use of wood make me one. I am a designer who cares about the effect of what I do, and about making good things for people to keep and cherish - that, surely, is simply the basic condition for 'good design'? ~ David Trubridge

Luxury starts where functionality ends and where the true value is personal and so has no price or reason. ~ Marcel Wanders

More and more, I feel the need for a house and a garden. ~ Marie Curie

It's kinda great to see the Celtics doin well again cuz that was so much fun in my day to go to the Boston Garden and they spit at you and throw things at you and talk about your mom. It sounds like dinner at Kenny Smith's house. ~ Charles Barkley

Instead of thinking about addiction, it makes sense to confront this reality: We are faced with technologies to which we are extremely vulnerable and we don't always respect that fact. The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities. Then, we can design technology and the environments in which we use them with these insights in mind. For example, since we know that multitasking is seductive but not helpful to learning, it's up to us to promote unitasking. ~ Sherry Turkle

Store of bees, in a dry and warme bee-house, comely made of fir boards, to sing, and sit, and feede upon your flowers and sprouts, make a pleasant noyse and sight. For cleanly and innocent bees, of all other things, love and become, and thrive in your orchard. If they thrive (as they must needs if your gardiner be skilfull, and love them: for they love their friends and hate none
but their enemies) they will besides the pleasure, yeeld great profit, to pay him his wages; yea the increase of twenty stock of stools with other bees, will keep your orchard. ~ William Lawson

When I'm not on tour, I love to have a long breakfast at home in my garden. ~ Andre Rieu

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. - IRVING JOHN GOOD, "SPECULATIONS CONCERNING THE FIRST ULTRAINTELLIGENT MACHINE," 1965 ~ Ray Kurzweil

I wonder, with all the flowers in the garden, how many of them ever think of hanging themselves with the garden hose, if ever they can. ~ Anthony Liccione

We'll meet again in Lvov, my love and I ... Tatiana hums, eating her ice cream, in our Leningrad, in jasmine June, near Fontanka, the Neva, the Summer Garden, where we are forever young. ~ Paullina Simons