Flowers and Gardens

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant! ―Edward Abbey

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. ―Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure, but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable. ―Joseph Addison

With daffodils mad footnotes for the spring; and asters purple asterisks for autumn. ―Conrad Aiken

One person’s weed is another person’s wildflower. ―Susan Wittig Albert, An Unthymely Death and Other Garden Mysteries

A child understands weeds that grow from lack of attention, in a garden. However, it is hard to explain the wild flowers that one gardener calls weeds, and another considers beautiful ground cover. ―Shannon L. Alder

Pluck not the wayside flower;
It is the traveler’s dower. ―William Allingham

Still, the flowers were growing right along with them, miniature roses and hydrangea, lavender and peonies, magenta and red and pink and purple flowers. And not just in the garden, but all around, the orchard was bursting with green, and smells, and birds singing until long after dark. ―Jodi Lynn Anderson

When the world wearies, and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden. —Minnie Aumonier

Dandelions are just friendly little weeds who only want to be loved like flowers. —Heather Babcock

The man who worries morning and night about the dandelions in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions. —Liberty Hyde Bailey

What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars of the earth, and are not our stars the flowers of the heavens? —A. J. Balfour

Love speaks in tulips. Truth requires thorns. ―Leigh Bardugo

The temple bell stops, but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers. ―Basho

If you find yourself worrying, go outside, take three breaths, address a tree and quietly say, “Thank you.” If you can’t find a tree, a dandelion will do. Nature is magic. ―Robert Bateman

Flowers have an expression of countenance as much as men or animals. Some seem to smile; some have a sad expression; some are pensive and diffident; others again are plain, honest, and upright—like the broad-faced sunflowers and the hollyhock. —Henry Ward Beecher

It gives one a sudden start in going down a barren, stony street, to see upon a narrow strip of grass, just within the iron fence, the radiant dandelion, shining in the grass, like a spark dropped from the sun. —Henry Ward Beecher

An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty. —Henry Ward Beecher

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into. —Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts, 1858

Flowers are love’s truest language. —Park Benjamin

Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet. —Jeremy Bentham

I don’t know whether nice people tend to grow roses or growing roses makes people nice. —Roland A. Beowne

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower. ―William Blake

You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet. ―Hal Borland

You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity. —Hal Borland

Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered . . . sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks. —Ray Bradbury

But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower. —Gwendolyn Brooks

Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul. —Luther Burbank

And over walls and earth and trees and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender little leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the gray urns in the alcoves and here and there everywhere were touches or splashes of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow above his head and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet pipes and humming and scents and scents.—Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Flowers don’t worry about how they’re going to bloom. They just open up and turn toward the light and that makes them beautiful. —Jim Carrey

We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves. —Leonora Carrington

Once an idea is out and about, it can’t be called back, silenced or erased. You can’t contain it, any more than you could put the head of a dandelion back together after the wind has scattered its seeds. —P. W. Catanese

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning. —Lydia M. Child

A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives you roses. —Chinese proverb

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. —Chinese proverb

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. —Chinese proverb

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. —Marcus Tullius Cicero

Some people need flowers, some people need dandelions. It’s medicine, it’s what you need at that time in your life. —Sandra Cisneros

How can one help shivering with delight when one’s hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade, and stiff with newborn vigor! —Colette

What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. —Suzanne Collins

Since the thing perhaps is to eat flowers and not to be afraid. —E. E. Cummings

When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower. —Alexander Den Heijer

If you tend to a flower, it will bloom, no matter how many weeds surround it. —Matshona Dhliwayo

A flower does not use words to announce its arrival to the world; it just blooms. —Matshona Dhliwayo

The dandelion’s pallid tube
Astonishes the grass,
And winter instantly becomes
An infinite alas.
—Emily Dickinson

The rose is the flower and handmaiden of love—the lily, her fair associate, is the emblem of beauty and purity. —Dorothea Dix

I think I like wildflowers best. They just grow wherever they want. No one has to plant them. And then their seeds blow in the wind and they find a new place to grow. —Rebecca Donovan

The garden has wrapped itself in autumn haze. An unusual autumn, lacking that thrill of vegetal warmth when the sap is still alive and holds up the trees, drunk on solar gold. It is the sorrowful climax of a summer’s drought. Never before was I so struck by the cancerous emaciation in a garden. The leaves started turning yellow in July and began falling, like a dance of prematurely withered bodies. —Emil Dorian, Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944

You love the roses—so do I. I wish the sky would rain down roses, as they rain from off the shaken bush. Why will it not? Then all the valley would be pink and white and soft to tread on. They would fall as light as feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be like sleeping and like waking, all at once!” —George Eliot

Earth laughs in flowers. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hamatreya

Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love is like wildflowers; it’s often found in the most unlikely places. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

I leave to children exclusively, but only for the life of their childhood, all and every the dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof, with the right to play among them freely, according to the custom of children, warning them at the same time against the thistles. —Williston Fish

By the time we left college, I had become my own image: a dandelion in the flower bed of society. Kinda cute, but still a weed. —Anne Fortier

If you’ve never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom. —Audra Foveo

I am in awe of flowers. Not because of their colors, but because even though they have dirt in their roots, they still grow. They still bloom. —D. Antoinette Foy

If dandelions were rare and fragile, people would knock themselves out to pay $14.95 a plant, raise them by hand in greenhouses, and form dandelion societies and all that. But, they are everywhere and don’t need us and kind of do what they please. So we call them weeds and murder them at every opportunity. —Robert Fulghum

May the stars carry your sadness away.
May the flowers fill your heart with beauty.
May hope forever wipe away your tears.
And, above all, may silence make you strong. —Chief Dan George

Flowers bring to a liberal and gentlemanly mind, the remembrance of honesty, comeliness, and all kinds of virtue. —John Gerard

Be like the flower . . . turn your face to the sun. —Kahlil Gibran

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life. —Jean Giraudoux

In summer, we work hard to make a tidy garden, bordered by pansies with rows or clumps of columbine, petunias, bleeding hearts. Then we find ourselves longing for the forest, where everything has the appearance of disorder; yet we feel peaceful there. —Natalie Goldberg

I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck. —Emma Goldman

The kiss of the sun for pardon the song of the birds for mirth.
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth. —Dorothy Frances Gurney

I have lost my smile, but don’t worry. The dandelion has it.—Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

She sprouted love like flowers, grew a garden in her mind, and even on the darkest days, from her smile the sun still shined. —Erin Hanson

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers. ―Heinrich Heine

Lilacs are May in essence. ―Jean Hersey

The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower—suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died. —Katherine Hepburn, Stage Door (1937)

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

By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity. ―Vernon Howard

I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too well-tended lawn. —William Henry Hudson

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in—what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars. ―Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“God will reward you,” he said. “You must be an angel since you care for flowers.” ―Victor Hugo

Why doesn’t constant trampling defeat the dandelion? The key to its strength is its long and sturdy root, which extends deep into the earth. The same principle applies to people. The true victors in life are those who, enduring repeated challenges and setbacks, have sent the roots of their being to such a depth that nothing can shake them. —Daisaku Ikeda

Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms. —Ikkyū

Don’t hover around lives that you are supposed to touch only for a brief while. If you don’t know how to drift away, ask a dandelion and it will show you the way! —Indhumathi

Every flower about a house certifies to the refinement of somebody. Every vine climbing and blossoming tells of love and joy. —Robert G. Ingersoll

A world of grief and pain
flowers bloom—
even then. —Kobayashi Issa

Happiness is to hold flowers in both hands.—Japanese proverb

You can’t choose to adore the flower and ignore the thorns. Love means loving every part of them, especially the unlovable parts. —Sarvesh Jain

Look at the flowers beneath your feet. They neither card nor spin . . . they neither sow nor weave; yet King Solomon shone less brightly than they. —Jesus

Where flowers bloom so does hope. —Lady Bird Johnson

Almost every person, from childhood, has been touched by the untamed beauty of wildflowers. —Lady Bird Johnson

My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering earth. —Lady Bird Johnson

In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends. —Okakura Kakuzo

Find the seed at the bottom of your heart and bring forth a flower. —Shigenori Kameoka

The gardens that make us happiest flourish because we have taken the time to make sure they feed our souls and fill a special place in our lives. —Lindley Karstens

I was born to catch dragons in their dens and pick flowers, to tell tales and laugh away the morning, to drift and dream like a lazy stream, and walk barefoot across sunshine days. ―James Kavanaugh

Let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive. —John Keats

Flowers are not made by singing “Oh, how beautiful,” and sitting in the shade. —Rudyard Kipling

Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul. —The Koran

There’s something very important to me about having a kind of relationship, with plants and animals, that can be transacted wholly without language. The warmth of one’s body is a form of communication. The stroke of one’s hand is a means of communication. In the garden those forms are heightened. I have a tendency when I’m walking in the garden to brush the flowers as I go by, anticipating the fragrant eloquence of their response. I get a sense of reciprocity that is very comforting, consoling. —Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion. —D. H. Lawrence

No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos. —D. H. Lawrence

A daffodil pushing up through the dark earth to the spring, knowing somehow deep in its roots that spring and light and sunshine will come, has more courage and more knowledge of the value of life than any human being I’ve met. —Madeleine L’Engle

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

Go for a short walk in a soft rain—lovely—so many wild flowers startling me through the woods and a lawn sprinkled with dandelions, like a night with stars. And through it all the sound of soft rain like the sound of innumerable earthworms stirring in the ground. —Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise. —James Lowell

The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me. —James Russell Lowell

Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers? —Maurice Maeterlinck

If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn. —Andrew Mason

There are always flowers for those who want to see them. —Henri Matisse

We have to do what we have to do. Miracles happen. The life force of this planet is very strong. Dandelions poke through sidewalks. We don’t know enough to give up. We only know enough to know that we have to try to change the course of human events. —Elizabeth May

Lowly, with a broken neck, the crocus lays her cheek to mire. —George Meredith

Flowers construct the most charming geometries: Circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass, seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes. —Duane Michals, The Vanishing Act

Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom, golden in the green grass, this life can be. —Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will be the gladdest thing under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one. ―Edna St. Vincent Millay

Almost any garden, if you see it at just the right moment, can be confused with paradise. —Henry Mitchell

Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence. —Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman

Flowers feed the soul. —Hadith Mohammed

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. —Claude Monet

I must have flowers, always, and always. —Claude Monet

“Water Lilies” is an extension of my life. Without the water, the lilies cannot live, as I am without art. —Claude Monet

Surely the flowers of a hundred spring are simply the souls of beautiful things! —Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Watchman and Other Poems

A fallen blossom
returning to the bough, I thought—
But no, a butterfly. —Arakida Moritake

When bright flowers bloom, parchment crumbles, my words fade, the pen has dropped. —Morpheus

Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon. —Toni Morrison

Simply surrounding yourself with flower arrangements—a blossom here, a blossom there—suggests you care about surrounding yourself with beauty. Just a single blossom can speak volumes. —Charlotte Moss

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords. —John Muir

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. —Iris Murdoch

Most of the dandelions had changed from suns into moons. —Vladimir Nabokov

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming. —Pablo Neruda

Each flower is a soul opening out to nature. —Gerald de Nerval

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat. —Beverly Nichols

Look at the flowers—for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are. —Osho

If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up, it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation. —Osho

Often the prickly thorn produces tender roses. —Ovid

So I ran fearing not where I’d go
When a flower grows wild
It can always survive
Wildflowers don’t care where they grow. —Dolly Parton

He who wants a rose must respect the thorn. —Persian proverb

Every flower blooms in its own time. —Ken Petti

Gardening, as compared to lawn care, tutors us in nature’s ways, fostering an ethic of give-and-take with respect to the land. Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place . . . For if lawn mowing feels like copying the same sentence over and over, gardening is like writing out new ones, an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery. Gardens also teach the necessary if un-American lesson that nature and culture can be compromised, that there might be some middle ground between the lawn and the forest . . . The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway. —Michael Pollan, Second Nature

Each leaf, each blade of grass vies for attention. Even weeds carry tiny blossoms to astonish us. —Marianne Poloskey

If, I can someday see Claude Monet’s garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colors and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a color garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature’s, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colors will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink. —Marcel Proust

Today, as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have changed their masters and their names, collided and smashed, disappeared into nothingness, their peaceful generations have crossed down the ages as fresh and smiling as on the days of battle. —Edgar Quinet, Philosophy of Human History, 1825

I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some. —Herbert Rappaport

Collaboration has no hierarchy. The Sun collaborates with soil to bring flowers on the earth. —Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step

Don’t try to force anything. Let life be a deep let-go. See Spirit opening millions of flowers every day without forcing the buds. —Bhagwan Shree Rayneesh

Minds are like flowers; they open only when the time is right. —Stephen Richards

I’m going to give you a handful of wildflowers so, each petal that falls will remind you that the earth breathes, and the moon rises. —Carolyn Riker

Each flower is a secret language. When I wear a combination of flowers together, it’s like I’m writing my own secret code that no one else can understand unless they know my language. —Holly Ringland, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

“Look at us,” said the violets blooming at her feet, “All last winter we slept in the seeming death, but at the right time God awakened us, and here we are to comfort you.” —Edward Payson Rod

Don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous. —Rumi

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity. —John Ruskin

The actual flower is the plant’s highest fulfilment . . . they are here first of all for delight. —John Ruskin

Wildflowers are the loveliest of all because they grow in uncultivated soil, in those hard, rugged places where no one expects them to flourish. —Micheline Ryckman

Flowers really do intoxicate me. —Vita Sackville-West

A flowerless room is a soul-less room, to my way of thinking; but even on solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it. —Vita Sackville-West

Dandelions are masters of survival. They can take root in places that seem little short of miraculous, and then are impossible to get rid of. —Anita Sanchez, The Teeth of the Lion: The Story of the Beloved and Despised Dandelion

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair. ―Susan Polis Schutz

Flowers don’t tell, they show. —Stephanie Skeem

Who would have thought it possible that a tiny little flower could preoccupy a person so completely that there simply wasn’t room for any other thought. —Sophie Scholl

In the hope of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet. —Albert Schweitzer

To pick a flower is so much more satisfying than just observing it, or photographing it . . . So in later years, I have grown in my garden as many flowers as possible for children to pick. —Anne Scott-James

L I K E is like a bunch of dandelion seeds falling beautifully on the ground. It’s a soft and good feeling but can come and go at any time. L O V E is when those same dandelion seeds become firmly rooted sowing its seeds and growing another dandelion on the spot. It takes a lot of energy to grow the dandelion like protecting it from the wind and giving it water and sunlight but it becomes very precious and beautiful in the end. —Seohyun

Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty. —William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 1609-11

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet. —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine. —William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Silently a flower blooms, in silence it falls away; yet here now, at this moment, at this place, the world of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming. This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom: The glory of eternal life is fully shining here. —Zenkei Shibayama

Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. —Veronica A. Shoffstall

Pull out the weeds, or make peace with the dandelions. ―Frank Sonnenberg

Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms. ―Ikkyu Sojun

If there were nothing else to trouble us, the fate of the flowers would make us sad. —John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections

All that in this delightful garden grows, should happy be, and have immortal bliss. ―Edmond Spencer

A rose is a rose is a rose. —Gertrude Stein

Dandelions, like all things in nature, are beautiful when you take time to pay attention to them. —June Stoyer

In a world full of roses, stand out like a dandelion in the middle of a green, plush lawn! —June Stoyer

The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins night and day in rhythmic measure. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth into numberless waves of flowers. —Rabindranath Tagore

He who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth is generally considered a fortunate person, but his good fortune is small compared to that of the happy mortal who enters this world with a passion for flowers in his soul. —Celia Thaxter

Already the dandelions Are changed into vanishing ghosts. —Celia Thaxter

Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there. ―Francis Thompson

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve. —Henry David Thoreau

She opened her sketchbook, carefully tore out several pages and handed them to Nasser—three detailed color sketches of three flowers. Leafing through the pages, he translated the message. A petunia: Your presence soothes me. A peppermint flower: warmth of feeling. And heartsease, the flower he’d given her so many times before. You occupy my thoughts. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading,” Lee said quietly, setting her sketchbook aside. “You’re not the only one who knows what flowers mean. —Kaye Thornbrugh

To analyze the charms of flowers is like dissecting music; it is one of those things which it is far better to enjoy, than to attempt to fully understand. —Henry T. Tuckerman

In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful. —Abram L. Urban

If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere. —Vincent Van Gogh

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy. —Lope de Vega

Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. —Kurt Vonnegut

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” —Alice Walker

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

Flowers do not force their way with great strife. Flowers open to perfection slowly in the sun. —White Eagle

In the dooryard fronting an old farmhouse near the white-wash’d palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with its flower I break. —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1865

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. —Walt Whitman

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden,
calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.
—Walt Whitman

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. —Walt Whitman

A weed is but an unloved flower. —Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A flower blossoms for its own joy. —Oscar Wilde

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. ―Tennessee Williams

A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring. —William Carlos Williams

The flowers of late winter and early spring occupy places in our hearts well out of proportion to their size. —Gertrude S. Wister

‘Tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes! —William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. —William Wordsworth

Pansies, lilies, kingcups, daisies,
Let them live upon their praises. —William Wordsworth

The poet’s darling. —William Wordsworth, To the Daisy

Next time you see a yardful of sprouting dandelions, note that they look remarkably like things we call “flowers.” And later, when the flowers turn into fluff balls, look closely at one of those fluff balls and ask yourself whether it’s really so unattractive. —Robert Wright

The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is – to bloom. —Yevgeny Zamyatin

It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come today. —Yevgeny Zamyatin

The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is—to bloom. —Yevgeny Zamyatin

Watercolor illustrations © virtosmedia and nuevoimg at 123RF Free Images.