Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it. – S.J. Perelman, Acres and Pains, 1951

By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course. – Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman, 1981

What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. – Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden, 1871

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. – Henry David Thoreau