For whatever reason this idea of a commons for storing short texts resonated with me and almost immediately I began, though in a quite unsystematic manner, keeping my own commonplace notebooks–a practice I have continued to this day. For many years, a recurrent assignment in my composition classes was asking students to create a personal repository of ideas, quotes, images, and insights collected during the semester. I always enjoyed skimming through the students’ commonplace books, and it was a rare term when I did not discover that one or more students had done their best work within this genre. In the final years of my teaching, I often asked students to produce many different kinds of “appositional” texts–compositions that either had no single thesis or manuscripts that invited readers to discover a thesis as the text evolved. All of those assignments–asking students to construct essays composed of passages in apposition with each other–were all descendants of that spring term in my freshman year of college when I was provided a new strategy for understanding how to read the book of Proverbs.
Old habits die hard. When I started working in the Alumni House Garden in 2014, I began spending my evening hours reading books and magazine articles on gardening. And it was inevitable that I start collecting passages I found interesting, thought-provoking, amusing, clever, astute, encouraging, insightful, incisive, etc. Copied below are 100 short passages from my collection: some recorded in digital files, some copied down by hand in several commonplace books, some on slips of paper in a file drawer, some underlined and notated in a copy of the book residing in my library. Just for fun, I’ve limited this culling exercise to pieces no longer than a single sentence–though #100 is, at least in its English translation, a very long sentence. In a few instances I have cheated, deleting intervening material so my version reduces the text to a single sentence. But most of my examples are rendered as I initially found them. ~Bob
• But though an old man, I am but a young gardener. ~Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Charles Wilson Peale, 20 Aug 1811
• . . . the idea of a garden–as a place, both real and metaphorical, where nature and culture can be wedded in a way that can benefit both–may be as useful to us today as the idea of wilderness has been in the past.” ~Michael Pollan, Second Nature
• Much of gardening is a return, an effort at recovering remembered landscapes. ~Michael Pollan, Second Nature
• Die when I may, I want it said by those who knew me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow. -Abraham Lincoln
• This is an art Which does mend Nature–change it rather; but / The art itself is nature. ~Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale
• As is the garden such is the gardener. ~Hebrew Proverb
• Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps; / Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvest reaps. ~A. Bronson Alcott, "The Garden"
• I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
• 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
• Gardening requires lots of water — most of it in the form of perspiration. ~Lou Erickson
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• What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. ~Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden
• Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes. ~Author Unknown
• The best place to seek God is in a garden. ~George Bernard Shaw
• In gardens, beauty is a by-product: the main business is sex and death. ~Sam Llewelyn
• The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. ~Hanna Rion
• Gardens are a form of autobiography. ~Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine
• To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. ~Mahatma Gandhi
• No two gardens are the same; no two days are the same in one garden. ~Hugh Johnson
• The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land. ~Abraham Lincoln
• The hum of bees is the voice of the garden. ~Elizabeth Lawrence
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• A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. ~May Sarton
• I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day. ~F. Frankfort Moore, A Garden of Peace
• Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise. ~Michael P. Garofalo
• Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there. ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
• To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch their renewal of life,—this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.... however small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property. ~Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden
• In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it. ~Frank McKinney Hubbard
• It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
• Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another. ~Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces
• On Laskett, Strong’s garden in Herefordshire:“a unique mnemonic landscape peopled with the ghosts of nearly everyone we have loved, both living and dead.” ~Roy Strong, Garden Party
• Garden design is “a long dialogue with the landscape.” ~Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Writing the Garden
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• A garden is not just a collection of plants; it is the planner’s interpretation of their historical significance and their suitability.” ~Penelope Hobhouse, The Country Gardener
• My garden is my favorite teacher. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, wildthymecreative.com
• I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden. ~Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666
• One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides. ~W.E. Johns, The Passing Show
• I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden. ~John Erskine
• In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. ~Margaret Atwood
• He talked and contrived endlessly to the effect that I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of a man's attention and care.... he insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing—and saying again and again—that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education. ~Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound
• The garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature. ~Jeff Cox
• In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. . . . With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. ~Alexander Smith, "Books and Gardens," Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country, 1863
• If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~Cicero
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• Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. ~Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
• The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. ~Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
• When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Anybody who wants to rule the world should try to rule a garden first. ~Gardening Saying
• Essential advice for the gardener: grow peas of mind, lettuce be thankful, squash selfishness, turnip to help thy neighbor, and always make thyme for loved ones. ~Author Unknown
• I am writing in the garden: to write as one should of a garden one must not write outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden. ~Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Garden
• In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener. ~Robert Rodale
• Life begins the day you start a garden. ~Chinese Proverb
• I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border: I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error. ~Sara Stein, My Weeds
• The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part ploughman. ~John R. Whiting
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• When God blesses the harvest, there is enough for the thief as well as the gardener. ~Polish Proverb
• More grows in the garden than the gardener sows. ~Spanish Proverb
• Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. ~Henry David Thoreau
• A gardener's best tool is the knowledge from previous seasons. . . . recorded in a $2 notebook. ~Andy Tomolonis
• And I beseech you, forget not to informe yourselfe as dilligently as may be, in things that belong to Gardening. ~John Evelyn
• Early to bed, early to rise; / Work like hell and fertilize. ~Emily Whaley
• Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but when I told that story around the campfire, nobody got scared. ~Jack Handey
• The ancient Hebrew association of man with soil is echoed in the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil. . . . we might consider changing our name to a more modest Homo sapiens curans, with the word curans denoting caring or caretaking, as in "curator." ~Daniel Hillel, Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil
• We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot. ~Leonardo da Vinci
• Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts. ~Author unknown
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• There is no gardening without humility. ~Alfred Austin
• Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
• A cloak of loose, soft material, held to the earth's hard surface by gravity, is all that lies between life and lifelessness. ~Wallace H. Fuller, Soils of the Desert Southwest
• Gardeners learn by trowel and error. ~Author unknown
• The ancient Chinese regarded earthworms as "angels of the earth." ~Lee Ann Gillen, "An Historical Perspective of Soil Microbiology"
• The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms.~Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould
• The best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow. ~Author unknown
• I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
• Gardening, reading about gardening, and writing about gardening are all one; no one can garden alone.” ~Elizabeth Lawrence, The Little Bulbs
• Montaigne, the essayist, said he hoped Death would find him planting cabbages. I myself would like to meet Death in the flower garden–falling facedown onto a cushion of Dianthus gratianopolitanus, if it’s not too much to ask. ~Elizabeth Sheldon, Time and the Gardener
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• A real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil. ~Karl Capek
• The true gardener despises nothing. . . . You may ignore, you may leave out, but you must never despise.” ~Ronald Farrer, quoted by Sheldon, Time and the Gardener
• Gertrude Jekyll’s creed: “sound work done with the right intention. . . . material used according to the capability of its nature and the purpose intended, with due regard to beauty of proportion and simplicity of effect.” Sheldon, Time and the Gardener
• Grass is the hair of the earth. ~Karl Foerster
• Gardens are, by definition, contrived. ~Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd, Our Life in Gardens
• As gardens grow older, they grow warmer; most plants, after all, live in mutually sustaining communities, not isolated as a single specimen. ~Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd, Our Life in Gardens
•For whereas even children have only their birthday and Christmas, Halloween and Easter, and the End of School mostly to anticipate, we can look forward to a host of special events: the season of snowdrops, and then of daffodils, then of magnolias and stewartias, and after that of lilacs and roses, poppies, asters, colchicum, autumn crocus, and snow. ~Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd, Our Life in Gardens
• The sturdy seedling with arched body comes / Shouldering its way and shedding the earth’s crumbs. ~Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed”
• Gardens are by definition private and enclosed spaces.” ~Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd, Our Life in Gardens
• So much in a garden happens by accident, or with a vague hope that somehow things will fill the expectation formed only in the mind. ~Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd, Our Life in Gardens
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• Earth laughs in flowers. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Hamatreya”
• Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. ~John Ruskin
• Garden Almightie first planted a Garden. . . . it is the Purest of Humane pleasure. ~Francis Bacon
• The very act of planting a seed in the earth has in it to me something beautiful . . . I watch my garden beds after they are sown, and think how one of God’s exquisite miracles is going on beneath the dark earth out of sight.” ~Celia Thaxter, My Island Garden
• You must give more to the soil than you take away. ~Karl Capek
• Describing Karl Capek’s gardening philosophy: “To garden is to come to understand the efforts by which life forced a foothold for itself in a hostile and resistant clay.” ~Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
• Gardens visibly gather around themselves the spiritual, mental, and physical energies that their surroundings would otherwise dissipate, disperse, and dissolve. ~Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
• The inherent beauty of the garden lies in the grouping of its parts—in the converging lines of its long ilex-walks, the alternation of sunny open spaces with cool woodland shade, the proportion between terrace and bowling-green, or between the height of a wall and the width of a path. Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and Their Gardens
• A story . . . is like a garden: it has its distinct shape, its articulated rhythm, its byways, its unfolding perspectives, its intrigues and surprises, its sinister undersides, its changing appearances and its transitive relationship to the ‘real world’ beyond its imaginary bounds. ~Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
• A Zen garden is to be read like a poem of which only a few half lines are written and it is up to the sagacity of the reader to fill in the blanks. ~Michel Tournier, Gemini
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• The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green Thought in a green Shade. ~Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”
•All gardening is landscape painting.” ~Rebecca Solnit quoting Alexander Pope
• If you garden you think about gardens. ~Mirabel Osler, A Gentle Plea for Chaos
• To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world. ~Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm
• Feed the soil, not the plants. ~Old Garden Adage
• All gardening involves constant change.” ~Gertrude Jekyll
• There is always a little bit of purslane in Paradise. ~Jennifer Wixson
• A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• When I die, bury me with a few garden tools, I shall make a garden in the heaven too. ~Preeth Nambiar, The Solitary Shores
• If it were of any use, every day the gardener would fall on his knees and pray somehow like this: ‘O Lord, grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight until three o’clock in the morning, but, you see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak it; grant that at the same time it would not rain on campion, alyssum, helianthemum, lavender, and the others which you in your infinite wisdom know are drought-loving plants – I will write their names of a bit of paper if you like – and grant that the sun may shine the whole day long, but not everywhere (not, for instance, on spirea, or on gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron), and not too much; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plant lice and snails, no mildew, and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano may fall from heaven. Amen. ~Karl Capek