Be pleased with your real garden, don't persue the perfection of a picture. What you see in a photo lasted only as long as the shutter snap.

If you cut a shrub back because it's just too big, and it dies, you haven't lost anything but a plant that couldn't live by your rules.

We blame Walt Disney for goldenrod's undeserved bad name. Despite Sneezy's pronouncement, plants such as goldenrod with heavy, insect-carried pollen rarely cause allergic reaction.

Don't design your back yard from the outside looking in. Design from your window looking out.

There's no "right way" to garden, only what suits each person and place.

Happiness comes from growing what thrives, not merely survives.

If a bush is too big, don't ask "should I?" Go ahead and cut it. If it lives, great. If it dies, replace it with something better suited!

Gardeners in regions with very long summer days have a great opportunity, and should use more of the cool colors that literally glow in the low light of morning and evening.

If someone says "You're not doing that right," hand him the shovel, sit and watch. That's the right way to garden.

You can put a gardener behind the wheel, but you can't keep her eyes off the landscape.

Silly gardeners! We buy pretty, comfortable benches and position them oh so carefully. But does the gardener ever sit? No! We perch momentarily and then jump up to do that next thing we see.

You know, I went through life and found that the bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards. So, I didn't mind to be so.

When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!

The idea isn't to do the impossible. The idea is to show the world that if one man can do the impossible, then maybe the rest of the world can do what's possible.

Truth is strong enough to overcome all human sophistries.

The fragile weave of natural sound is being torn apart by our seemingly boundless need to conquer the environment rather than to find a way to abide in consonance with it.

Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world.

The trouble with lies was that once started, the fiction had to be continued, and it was hard always to be remembering details that you had made up upon the spur of the moment.

I'd done "Gosford Park," a film that Julian Fellowes had written that Robert Altman directed.

For men may prove and use their friends, as the poet expresses it, usque ad aras, meaning that a friend should not be required to act contrary to the law of God.

It is sweet to surve one country by deeds, and it is not absurd to surve her by words.