There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.

Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.

all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.

I like owls. I admire their intransigent spirit. I have respected them deeply ever since I met a baby owl in a wood, when it fell over dead, apparently from sheer temper, because I dared to approach it. It defied me first, and then died. I have never forgotten the horror and shame I experienced when that soft fluffy thing (towards which I had nothing but the most humanitarian motives) fell dead from rage at my feet.

Of course I should love to throw a toothbrush into a bag, and just go, quite vaguely, without any plans or even a real destination. It is the Wanderlust.

I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.