happiness makes us older, less romantic, less in need of dreams. Discontent, not happiness, is the food of youth and poetry.

A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.

... garden books are quite unconscious that besides telling us how to turn our patch of earth into a garden, they are also expressing the way their age looks at the world, the state of their society.

happiness makes us older, less romantic, less in need of dreams. Discontent, not happiness, is the food of youth and poetry.

The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain, to show them that we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do.

I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable.

leisure is an attitude of mind, not simply remission of work.