Mirabel Osler quotes:

Sitting in your garden is a feat to be worked at with unflagging determination and single-mindedness. . . . I am deeply committed to sitting in the garden.

To be able to walk under the branches of a tree that you have planted is really to feel you have arrived with your garden. So far we are on the way: we can now stand beside ours.

Green thoughts emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released.

Reading books about gardens is a potent pastime; books nourish a gardener's mind in the same way as manure nourishes plants.

As for garden photographers, how differently they see things. With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty with its discriminating lens. The naked eye can't censor some ugly sight on the periphery of vision; the photographer takes the perfect shot and picks for us just what we need to see.

At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous.

Crouchers move through a garden at a stoop: naming, gasping, horraying, admiring or coveting plants; Gapers saunter, smiling or sighing at what they find, succumbing to an intangible beatitude that takes them for a brief escape into another dimension. Both sorts of gardener are besotted; both get their hands dirty; think and talk gardening; but on the threshold of another's garden, each use a different set of whiskers.

Have you ever noticed how few sitting places you find in private gardens? How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting, never stop . . . To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an outrage towards every felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden.

Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality, are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens, why not in our own.

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.

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.

When the ice of winter holds the house in its rigid grip, when curtains are drawn against that vast frozen waste of landscape, almost like a hibernating hedgehog I relish the security of being withdrawn from all that summer ferment that is long since past. Then is the time for reappraisal: to spread out, limp and receptive, and let garden thoughts rise to the surface. They emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released.