"A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations."
"There are few gardens that can be left alone. A few years of neglect and only the skeleton of a garden can be traced. . . . Japanese artists working with a few stones and sand four hundred years ago achieved strangely lasting compositions. However there, too, but for the hands that have piously raked the white sand into patterns and controlled the spread of moss and lichens, little would remain."
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Source: Russell Page (2010). “The Education of a Gardener”, p.45, Random House
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"Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart."
"To plant trees is to give body and life to one's dreams of a better world."
"A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith, the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise."
"'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and love growing things."
"Garden making, like gardening itself, concerns the relationship of the human being to his natural surroundings."