Smelling (original) (raw)

Quotes For Gardeners

The Scents, Smells, Fragrances, and Odors in the Garden

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

From the Spirit of Gardening Website

This webpage was moved to a new URL. It is now maintained and updated at: http://www.egreenway.com/reason/smell.htm

Of all the ingredients we employ in the creation of a garden, scent is probably

the most potent and the least understood. Its effects can be either direct and immediate, drowning our senses in a surge of sugary vapor, or they can be subtle and delayed, slowly wafting into our consciousness, stirring our emotions and coloring our thoughts. - Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991

Scents bring memories, and many memories bring nostalgic pleasure. We would be wise to plan for this when we plant a garden. - Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973

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Perfumes are the feelings of flowers. - Heinrich Heine

It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad. - D. H. Lawrence

Today I think Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield, And bracken, and wild carrot's seed, An the square mustard field; Odours that rise When the spade wounds the root of tree, Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed, Rhubarb or celery; - Edward Thomas, Digging

When I was a boy, I thought scent was contained in dewdrops on flowers and if I got up very early in the morning, I could collect it and make perfume. - Oscar De La Renta

Food - Quotes for Gardeners

The gardens of my youth were fragrant gardens and it is their sweetness rather than their patterns of their furnishings that I now most clearly recall.
- Louise Beebe Wilder

Sweetly breathing , vernal air, That with kind warmth doth repair Winter's ruins; from whose breast All the gums and spice of the East Borrow their perfumes; whose eye Gilds the morn, and clears the sky. - Thomas Carew, 1595 - 1645

A garden full of sweet odours is a garden full of charm, a most precious kind

of charm not to be implanted by mere skill in horticulture or power of purse,
and which is beyond explaining. It is born of sensitive and very personal
preferences yet its appeal is almost universal."
- Louise Beebe Wilder

My garden, with its silence and pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars. - Alexander Smith

Quotes for Gardeners

Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,000 Quotes Arranged by Over 105 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose,
and the eyes will take care of themselves.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

Don't wear perfume in the garden unless you want to be pollinated by bees. - Anne Raver

There are few pleasures like really burrowing one's nose into sweet peas. - Angela Thirkell

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air. - Charles Baudelaire

Flowers - Quotes for Gardeners

Can words describe the fragrance of the very breath of spring - that delicious commingling of the perfume of arbutus, the odor of pines, and the snow-soaked soil just warming into life. - Neltje Blanchan

Through the open door A drowsy smell of flowers - grey heliotrope And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette Comes fairly in, and silent chorus leads To the pervading symphony of Peace. - John Greenleaf Whittier

Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay. - George Meredith

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. - Walt Whitman, Give Me That Splendid Silent Sun, 1819 - 1892

The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents. - Joseph Wood Krutch

The strange thing which I have experienced with flower scents, and indeed with all other scents, is that they only recall pleasant memories. - Theodore A. Stephens

How miraculous that growing on my own little plot of land are plants that can turn the dead soil into a hundred flavors as different as horseradish and thyme, smells ranging from stinkhorn to lavender. - John Seymour

I went out into the garden in the morning dusk, When sorrow enveloped me like a cloud; And the breeze brought to my nostril the odor of spices, As balm of healing for a sick soul. - Moses Ibn Ezra, 1060 - 1138

They walked over the crackling leaves in the garden, between the lines of box, breathing its fragrance of eternity; for this is one of the odors which carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past; if we ever lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there was box growing on it. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

My lilac trees are old and tall; I cannot reach their bloom at all. They send their perfume over trees And roof and streets, to find the bees. - Lousie Driscoll, 1875 - 1957, My Garden Is a Pleasant Place

Those herbs which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest,
but, being trodden upon and crushed, are three;
that is, burnet, wild thyme and watermints. Therefore, you are to set
whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.
- Frances Bacon

Seeing - Quotes for Gardeners

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order. - John Burroughs

Fragrance, whether strong or delicate, is a highly subjective matter, and one gardener's perfume is another gardener's stink. - Katharine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, 1979

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The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night. - Isak Dinesen

A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up in the air. - Henry Ward Beecher

For many people the scent of certain plants can revive memories with a vividness that nothing else can equal, for the sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that and left the conscious mind.
- Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973

O the green things growing, the green things growing, The faint sweet smell of the green things growing! - Dinah Mulock Craik

That which above all other yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet. - Francis Bacon

This webpage was moved to a new URL. It is now maintained and updated at: http://www.egreenway.com/reason/smell.htm

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. - Helen Keller

So great is the economy of Nature, that most flowers which are fertilized by crepuscular or nocturnal insects emit their odor chiefly or exculsively in the evening. - Charles Darwin

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. - Nabokov

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

Hearing - Quotes for Gardeners

... the most fiendish plant I know of, the sort of thing Beelzebub might pluck to make a bouquet for his mother-in-law ... it looks as if it had been made out of a sow's ear for the spathe, and the tail of a rat that died of Elephantiasis for the spadix. The whole thing is mingling of unwholesome greens, livid purples, and pallid pinks, the livery of putrescence in fact, and it possesses and odour to match the colouring. - E. A. Bowles, My Garden in Spring, 1914 Speaking about the Dracunculus vulgaris, syn. Arum Dracunculus(Dragon Arum)

For more suggestions from mAlice about plants that appeal to "Gothic" tastes be sure to visit:
Gothic Gardening: Something Wicked This Way Grows

Your nose is the scenter of your face.

Scent is the most potent and bewitching substance in the gardener's repertory and yet it is the most neglected and least understood. The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it it detected. Each fragrance, whether sweet or spicy, light or heavy, comes upon you in its own way and evokes its own emotional response. - Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991

The gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.
- John Burroughs

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. - Margaret Atwood

This webpage was moved to a new URL. It is now maintained and updated at: http://www.egreenway.com/reason/smell.htm

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Quotes for Gardeners

Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,000 Quotes, Arranged by 105 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

The Spirit of Gardening



Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo

I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas, Contributions, and Suggestions E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California

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