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Yantis Lakeside Gardens -
Living and Gardening in the Beautiful Texas Hill Country
Fun Garden Sayings
I want to thank my friend Carolyn Lange for finding these quotes.
"There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments."
Janet Kilburn Phillips
"Real gardeners buy at least ten thousand plants in the course of a lifetime without having the least idea where they'll put any of them when they get home."
"Real gardeners know their gardens change size in the course of a year. When they order seeds and plants in the winter, their gardens are the size of a football field. At planting time in the spring, their gardens are the size of a postage stamp. When it's 100 degrees outside in August, their gardens are the size of three football fields. And in the fall, when it's time to clean up, their gardens don't exist at all!"
"Real gardeners have a home library with one bible, one cookbook, one dictionary, one novel, one biography, and two hundred books on how to plant a bean seed."
"Real gardeners have one hammer, one saw, one screwdriver, and seventeen different shovels."
"Real gardeners don't care what anyone thinks of them when they steal their neighbors' bags of grass clippings for mulch."
"Real Gardeners know they're going to live forever. Why else would a ninety-year-old gardener plant two oak tree seedlings, then look through a catalog for a hammock.
Gardeners: People who try to keep plants alive in and around their homes. They're divided into the following categories based on their level of expertise:
*novice gardener: Someone who hasn't gardened long enough to kill one hundred plants.
*experienced gardener: Someone who's gardened long enough to kill one thousand plants.
*expert gardener: Someone who's qualified to tell others how to kill ten thousand plants.
Garden: An equal opportunity employer of the earth's most eccentric people, who together produce enough flowers and vegetables to feed all of the world's insects, groundhogs, raccoons and deer.
A weed is a plant that is not only in the wrong place, but intends to stay. /Sara Stein
Weeds are nature's graffiti /Janice Maeditere
If you are not killing plants, you are not really stretching yourself as a gardener. /J.C. Raulston
Friends are flowers in a life's garden
Author Unknown
Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it
Author Unknown
Gardening is a way of showing you believe in tomorrow
Author Unknown
The flowers of all tomorrows are the seeds of today
Author Unknown
"Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get!"
H. Jackson Brown
Despite the gardener's best intentions, nature will improvise
Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
Author Unknown
A Diggers Dictionary
bamboo: A plant bought as an infant to create a small vertical background in the garden. Instead, gardeners find that they've installed a behemoth that grows thirty feet tall, and is so invasive that it takes them twenty minutes to find the front door after parking in their driveways.
borer: A garden club member who induces sleep by telling the same story about his four-pound tomatoes at every meeting.
compost pile: A heap containing soil, manure, and garden plants that were supposed to yield flowers and vegetables, but died while under the gardener's care.
d-rt: The offensive four-letter word used by non-gardeners instead of "soil." They do this because they think soil is something to be avoided, since it makes them d-rty
dungarees: Pants that gardeners wear while working in their backyards. Retailers managed to triple their price simply by renaming them "jeans".
fence: A barrier that gardeners erect to keep out deer, groundhogs, and ball retrieving kids with size twelve sneakers. In reality, it succeeds in none of these endeavors, but gardeners delude themselves into believing otherwise.
garden center: A store where gardeners go to spend $5 for things they don't need, but end up spending $105 for things they don't need.
green supremacists: People who think that their front lawns should stay green from April to November, regardless of drought conditions. They're ready to use any chemical to maintain their lawn, and can usually be found caring for and mowing it at 6:30 AM every Saturday morning. They compare themselves with their neighbors based on the greenness and lack of diversity of their lawn. No temperate zone green supremacist can accept the idea that lawn grasses naturally go dormant and turn brown in hot weather.
hybrid tea rose: A plant hybridized by botanists to be drought intolerant and susceptible to attack by every fungus and insect pest on the planet.
plantslaughter (as in plant slaughter, not plants laughter): The botanical version of man-slaughter, namely, the involuntary killing of plants. Fortunately, this hasn't become a criminal offense. If it ever does, gardeners would fill the jails and become extremely involuntary indoor horticulturists.
rabbits: Garden marauders with extraordinary mental powers. They send subliminal messages to gardeners, making us believe that the way to keep them out is to plant marigolds, which are, of course their most preferred food.
seasons: Three-month segments marked by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors among all gardeners. More specifically:
* spring: The season when gardeners rush the growing season by planting annuals when the temperature first hits 65 degrees, even though it's four weeks before the last frost.
* summer: The season when gardeners spend money on water, fertilizer, tomato cages, bamboo stakes, and topsoil: and time on weeding, spreading mulch, killing insects, chasing groundhogs,and harvesting enough vegetables to make one salad.
* fall: The season when gardeners come back from vacation to discover that their garden has become a humiliating, irreparable mess.
* winter: The season when gardener's power bills reach astronomical levels because of the electric lights needed to keep indoor plants growing when they should be dormant.
seed catalog: An instrument of temptation so salacious that it's producers have wisely decided to send it to gardeners wrapped in brown paper.
topiary: A form of horticultural torment that forces plants to grow into unnatural shapes so that their owners can impress gardeners unskilled in the art of torture.
trowel: A tool made for gardeners who move plants from the left side of the garden to the right, and back again every year. They're constructed to last at least 10 years, but only last two because most gardeners use them as hammers.
If not indicated otherwise, Art Wolk, Garden Lunacy: A Growing Concern (AAB book Publishing LLC,2005), 20
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