The Elders Speak:
On Plants

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience.
Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
Hal Borland, Countryman: A Summary of Belief

Where flowers bloom so does hope.
Lady Bird Johnson

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic

None can have a healthy love for flowers unless he loves the wild ones.
Forbes Watson

Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty.
Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life

But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit. Weeds are people's idea, not nature's.
Anonymous

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
Abraham Lincoln

I am the grass. I cover all.
Carl Sandburg

Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow.
Alice M. Swaim

For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu Suzuki

Grass is the forgiveness of nature - her constant benediction. Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.
Brian Ingalls

If you pass by the color purple in a field and don't notice it, God gets real pissed off.
Alice Walker

Flowers and fruit are only the beginning. In the seed lies the life and the future.
Marion Zimmer Bradley

It is no use trying to improve on children's names for wildflowers.
Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.
James Russell LowellThe Growth of a Legend

Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
Henry David Thoreau

My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.
Margaret Bourke-White

A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.
Doug Larson

The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.
Oliver Wendell Holmes