Sage Advice - Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman
(image courtesy Wikipedia)

"The word paradise is derived from the ancient Persian - 'a green place'. Paradise haunts gardens, and some gardens are paradises. Mine is one of them. Others are like bad children - spoilt by their parents, over-watered and covered with noxious chemicals."

Derek Jarman (1942-94)
Film Director, Artist and Gardener

Sage Advice - Anne Wareham

"Gardening is boring. It is repetitious, repetitive and mind-blowingly boring, just like housework. All of it – sowing seeds, mowing, cutting hedges, potting up, propagating – is boring, and all of it requires doing over and over again. if there are enjoyable jobs they're mostly enjoyable for the result not the process."

Anne Wareham writing in The Bad Tempered Gardener (2011)



Anne Wareham (image courtesy telegraph.co.uk)

Sage Advice - William Robinson

"One of the first things the lover of flower gardening should do is to get a clear idea of the distinction between gardening and botany. Gardening is an inexhaustible art; botany is a world science, and the great mistake is to consider gardening from the point of view of the botanist."

William Robinson, writing in the Preface of the 1934 edition of The English Flower Garden

Image of William Robinson courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

Sage Advice - Margery Fish

"I could go on and on. But that is just what gardening is, going on and on. "

Margery Fish We Made a Garden (1956)

Sage Advice - Beverley Nichols

"By no means all of my friends are gardeners and I never say to people 'would you like to look at the garden?' because any lover of gardens, even if he sees only a lawn and a solitary herbaceous border, will ask to see it himself."



Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) writing in Down the Garden Path (1932)

Sage Advice - Hubert Reeves

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.”

Hubert Reeves