Sustainable Garden Design Quotes

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

Anya had never seen a house uglier house than Baba Yaga's. It was made entirely of mouldy bones in the same interlocking design as a log cabin. A thorny garden grew as high as the fence and skulls, bleached white by the sun, capped each fence post. Two enormous scaly chicken legs came out on either side of the house. Anya snorted in amusement and disgust. Yvan, she noticed, had turned an interesting shade of grey. ~ Amy Kuivalainen

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

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

Every person sees the world through lenses of his or her own design - individual goggles that alter focus and perspective as desired. For those who wish the world to be dark and ugly and unapproachable, it is. But for those who wish it to be beautiful, it is a garden playground blooming with bright, happy colors. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it's appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished. ~ W.S. Merwin

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

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

Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive; you will be able to design a house together with your family; a garden for your children; places where you can work; beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream. ~ Christopher Alexander

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden. ~ Stephen Gardiner

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 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

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

In a garden long ago, the two majestic beings God had created used their capacities for purposes other than reflecting the goodness of their Creator. Adam and Eve commandeered their design to worship themselves instead of God. Their children and grandchildren have been doing the same ever since. ~ Jeremy Pierre

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

The coming together of a man and woman was a holy thing, after all. God had chosen this way of replenishing the earth. God did everything so elegantly, with such an exquisite attention to detail. She knew this from studying the flowers in the garden and watching the morning sky, all mauve and pink and orange. So beautiful. But God had looked at all this, His ideas, His wonderful sense of color and design put into action, and had said merely that it was good. Not great. Not fantastic. Just good. But when He had looked at man and woman together, He had said it was "very good". ~ Naomi Ragen

Landscape design theory has been rotting away, peacefully, like a garden temple, since the close of the eighteenth century. ~ Tom Turner

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

In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone. ~ Gertrude Jekyll

And God was like, "It's not a tumor. That's your appendix. Appendixes go at the end. Read a book, dude." Then Adam was all, "Really? Because I don't want to second-guess you but it seems like a design flaw. Also that snake in the garden told me it doesn't even do anything." And God shook his head and muttered, "Jesus, that fucking snake is like TMZ." And then Adam was like, "Who's Jesus?" and God said, "No one yet. It's just an idea I'm throwing around." And ~ Jenny Lawson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merlin, do you mind?' It was the King who asked me, a man as old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding problems, and guess what it might men to me, to walk in dead air where once the world had been a god-filled garden. ~ Mary Stewart

A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people. ~ Wendell Berry

I get very close to people when I'm shooting them. We would go and shoot a scene with Lucy, and I would spend the whole time telling her about Rob. Then I would go shoot a scene with Rob and tell him all about Lucy. Eventually they wanted to know each other. These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context. We brought to the garden at Rob's office and just sat and watched what unfolded. I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected. ~ Abigail Disney

Plus I have no doubt that their garden is also where my grandparents dreamed - for a better life of equality for their grandchildren and future generations. As people rooted in their faith, they probably did a lot of praying here as well, that God would deliver us all to prosperity and peace beyond this plot of land. ~ Deborah L. Parker

It seems that most the world is driven by the eye, right? They design cities to look great but they always sound horrible, ... They design telephones to look great, but they sound horrible. I think it was about time that the other senses were celebrated. ~ Bjork

It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God's design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden - a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a slave society. ~ David Brion Davis

This is the rock garden.
In it, the stones
too are flowers ~ Margaret Atwood

The point of our service in the church isn't how much we do and how important we are. The point is whether or not we're taking our place in the synchronized dance that God is orchestrating. When each one takes their assigned role, the design is fabulous! When one wants to do their own thing, needing attention, wanting to hog the show, or playing to the crowd, disaster ensues. ~ Carolyn Tennant

This device became a big hit. Our new challenge became how to satisfy demand for it. To put this in perspective, we were a company composed of a handful of people with a new type of design and a fragile technology, housed in a little rented building, and we were trying to supply the seemingly insatiable appetite of large computer companies for memory chips. The ~ Andrew S. Grove

Adam and Eve lived in a perfect world. Their continued presence in the Garden was contingent on the keeping of only a few commandments, not 613 commandments. Under the best conditions this world has ever seen, Adam and Eve break one of the three laws and die in exile. It is not at all clear how the telling of the story of Adam and Eve's failure to keep only a few commandments in a perfect world is supposed to encourage Israel to keep 613 commandments in a fallen world. Actually, it offers no encouragement, at all. And if we take the principle of ma'asei avot' siman l'banim seriously, Adam's story never was intended to warn Israel from following in Adam's footsteps (i.e., a warning to keep the Law). Rather, Adam's story was intended to be a prophecy that Israel would follow in Adam's footsteps. "Israel, you will be just like Adam. ~ Seth D. Postell

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock. ~ Donella H. Meadows

Sam's light-cycle, the car, and the jets are new of course, and other stuff. The new ones are sleeker and so contemporary, that if you could put them in a car design show they would hold up. ~ Daniel Simon