the large black slugs ... come out at dusk. Enormous slugs. As big as crocodiles. So huge we need a gun to shoot them. And by the end of the summer, if they go on growing, we shall have to go out in pairs together for protection.

Summer weather, like being in love,is a philosopher's stone which turns our ordinary days to gold. But not the whole day ... For it is never the whole day, never all our life which is transformed in any happiness, but only the exquisite moments.

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.

A garden is one of the few expressions of man's nature that is altogether benign.

Every search has its own momentum. It is why a search makes such an excellent plot for a film or story.

... 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.

Most of us are experts at solving other people's problems, but we generally solve them in terms of our own and the advice we give is seldom for other people but for ourselves.