Quotes About Shrubs

“[Anna] In February, I woke up from a nap. A bouquet of flowers gathered from the various bushes and shrubs scattered around the island lay on the blanket beside me, a small length of rope wound around their stems.
I found T.J. down at the shore. "Someone's been checking the calendar."
He grinned. "I didn't want to miss Valentine's Day."
I kissed him. "You're sweet to me."
Pulling me closer, he said, "It's not hard, Anna."
I stared into T.J.'s eyes, and he started to sway. My arms went around his neck and we danced, moving in a circle, the sand soft and warm under our feet.
"You don't need music, do you?"
"No," T.J. said. "But I do need you.”

— Tracey Garvis-Graves

“And, indeed it is a very pleasant thing for to ride forth in the dawning of a Springtime day. For then the little birds do sing their sweetest song, all joining in one joyous medley, whereof one may scarce tell one note from another, so multitudinous is that pretty roundelay; then do the growing things of the earth smell the sweetest in the freshness of the early daytime-the fair flowers, the shrubs, and the blossoms upon the trees; then doth the dew bespangle all the sward as with an incredible multitude of jewels of various colors; then is all the world sweet and clean and new, as though it had been fresh created for him who came to roam abroad so early in the morning.”

— Howard Pyle

“Lyon knew she wasn't aware she was being watched, either. She wouldn't have eaten the leaf otherwise, or reached for another.
"Sir, which one is Princess Christina?" Andrew asked Lyon, just as Rhone started in choking on his laughter. Rhone has obviously been watching Christina, too.
"Sir?"
"The blond-headed one," Lyon muttered, shaking his head. He watched in growing disbelief as Christina daintily popped another leaf into her mouth.
"Which blond-headed one?" Andrew persisted.
"The one eating the shrubs.”

— Julie Garwood

“In water and on land, in trees, shrubs, and creepers-everywhere in the whole universe abides my Beloved. Further, all the various forms and modes of being that we behold, are they not expressions of my Beloved? For there is none save Him. He is smaller than the smallest, and greater than the greatest.”

— Anandamayi Ma

“The way to get a deciduous hedge for free is to ask a neighbor to let you take divisions from his shrubs. You can take ten or twenty sucker-like shoots with their roots attached before he will notice and start to feel like a sucker himself. Thank him profusely and suggest that you'd love to have him and the wife over to dinner sometime, but don't give a specific date. Perhaps in the winter, you might suggest, when there's not so much work to do in the yard.
... in about three to five years the little suckers will grow into an informal hedge whose height will depend on the type of shrub you have selected. I know three to five years is a long time when you're middle-aged and older. But what do you want? You've just glommed several hundred dollars' worth of shrubs for free, for heaven's sake. In three to five years your neighbor will have forgotten about that dinner, also.”

— Cassandra Danz

“She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls. To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees an shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full.”

— Katherine Howe

“I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. ( ... ) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.”

— Janet Fitch

“The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active.”

— Herman Melville

“Into these pavilions he admitted the elect, and there, says Marco Polo, gave them to eat a certain herb, which transported them to Paradise, in the midst of ever-blooming shrubs, ever-ripe fruit, and ever-lovely virgins. What these happy persons took for reality was but a dream; but it was a dream so soft, so voluptuous, so enthralling, that they sold themselves body and soul to him who gave it to them, and obedient to his orders as to those of a deity, struck down the designated victim, died in torture without a murmur, believing that the death they underwent was but a quick transition to that life of delights of which the holy herb, now before you, had given them a slight foretaste." "Then," cried Franz, "it is hashish! I know that-by name at least.”

— Alexandre Dumas

“We have very pretty Dutch gardens, so called, in America, but their chief claim to being Dutch is that they are set with bulbs, and have Delft or other earthen pots or boxes for formal plants or shrubs.”

— Alice Morse Earle

“When she slowly straightened, the land was vast before her. The sun was setting down the river, casting a cold pink hue along the white-capped mountains that framed both sides of the valley. Upriver, the willow shrubs and gravel bars, the spruce forests and low-lying poplar stands, swelled to the mountains in steely blue. No fields or fences, homes or roads; not a single living soul as far as she could see in any direction. Only wilderness.”

— Eowyn Ivey

“We should extinguish not candles, but torches, my good neighbour; we should fell not shrubs but trees: we should kill one giant instead of ten dwarfs!.. When there is an ostentatious cock crowing all over the place, what is the use of killing one insignificant chick? In a war you have to kill the king first; thus you can put an end to the battle more quickly!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“I adore gardening and plan to take it up properly when I have a bit more time on my hands. Until then, I love pottering in garden centres. I'm totally low maintenance. I don't ask for fancy plants, just basic, long-lasting shrubs that look nice. But I am particular about flowers.”

— Shilpa Shetty

“My son, you've seen the temporary fire
and the eternal fire; you have reached
the place past which my powers cannot see.
I've brought you here through intellect and art;
from now on, let your pleasure be your guide;
you're past the steep and past the narrow paths.
Look at the sun that shines upon your brow;
look at the grasses, flowers, and the shrubs
born here, spontaneously, of the earth.
Among them, you can rest or walk until
the coming of the glad and lovely eyes
those eyes that weeping, sent me to your side.
Await no further word or sign from me:
your will is free, erect, and whole
to act
against that will would be to err: therefore
I crown and miter you over yourself”

— Dante Alighieri

“Then it's a deal, we're friends."
[ ... ]
"Can we just make one conditional rule here? That if we get into a situation where we know-absolutely-that we're going to die, we can have-"
She pulled her hand away. "Don't say it!"
He did. "Sex."
She glared her disbelief. "You are such and asshole!"
"I am," Ian agreed. I'm afraid that accepting me for who I am comes with the territory when talking friendship."
"Stay in the shadows, asshole," she said, then turned to stalk up the lawn toward the deck.
"Thank you," he said as he headed for the shrubs. "I appreciate our open-minded acceptance of my asshole-ishness."
And he wasn't sure, but he could've sword that he heard Phoebe laugh.”

— Suzanne Brockmann

“All those different names, dates, deaths, each backed with a past life, were like shrubs in an arboretum, spaced out equidistantly as far as the eye could
see. No gently swaying breezes for them, no fragrances, no touch of a hand reaching through the darkness. They who seemed like trees lost to time. They to whom no thoughts occurred, nor would ever have words to get them across. They'd left all that to those who still had some living to do.”

— Haruki Murakami

“The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air. From”

— Jack London

“A bald eagle perched in a dead tree, watching us. The landscape was bold. Not only was the property on the North Platte River but the river ran through it, taking an east-west turn for a few miles in its course. The land was a section, 640 acres, a square mile of riparian shrubs and cottonwood, some wetland areas during June high water, sage flats and a lot of weedy overgrazed pasture (46).”

— Annie Proulx

“A dense wall of greenery bordered it, ... an impenetrable barrier of oaks, evergreen shrubs, blackberry that somehow resisted the frost, and thorns. In the defense department, the witches would make Sleeping Beauty's evil witch weep with jealousy.”

— Ilona Andrews

“I have a green thumb. I really like to get into the shrubs, the bushes, and really cultivate.”

— Jeffrey Donovan

“I'm a very big fan of winter-flowering shrubs and bulbs. You have the smell, you have the color - it's really like a present from God when something like that is in flower in the middle of the snow.”

— Dries Van Noten

“Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs ... Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.”

— Aldous Huxley

“She went back down to the garden, feeling like a queen, hearing the birds sing-this was in winter-seeing the sky all golden, the sun in the trees, flowers among the shrubs, bewildered, wild, giddy with inexpressible rapture.”

— Victor Hugo

“The young family who'd moved into the Miller home had gotten rid of the Millers' trademark overflowing flower boxes. The new owners of the Davis place had ripped out those wonderful shrubs Bob Davis had worked on every weekend. It all reminded Myron of an invading army ripping down the flags of the conquered.”

— Harlan Coben

“It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and spindles against the skyline; yet now that he was out, and on his feet, it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows and exploded with growth. A canopy of sticky young leaves clung to the branches above him. There were startling yellow clouds of forsythia, trails of purple aubrietia; a young willow shook in a fountain of silver. The first of the potato shoots fingered through the soil, and already tiny buds hung from the gooseberry and currant shrubs like the earrings Maureen used to wear. The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy.”

— Rachel Joyce

“He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs ... This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven?”

— Ernest Hemingway

“A person was like a dense forest thicket, overgrown with a twisting mess of vines, weeds, shrubs, saplings, and flowers. No person was one single emotion; no person had only one desire. They had many, and usually those desires conflicted with one another like two rosebushes fighting for the same patch of ground.”

— Brandon Sanderson

“The need for a garden of rare palms and vines and ornamental trees and shrubs which would be near enough to a growing city to form a quiet place where children with their elders could peer, as it were, into those fascinating jungles and palm glades of the tropics which have for generations stimulated the imaginations of American youth.”

— David Fairchild

“The primary purpose of the Legislature in establishing "Arbor Day," was to develop and stimulate in the children of the Commonwealth a love and reverence for Nature as revealed in trees and shrubs and flowers. In the language of the statute, "to encourage the planting, protection and preservation of trees and shrubs" was believed to be the most effectual way in which to lead our children to love Nature and reverence Nature's God, and to see the uses to which these natural objects may be put in making our school grounds more healthful and at-tractive.”

— Andrew S. Draper

“My pre-occupation is with the relationship between objects, whether I am dealing with woods, fields or water, rocks or trees, shrubs and plants, or groups of plants.”

— Russell Page

“My own preference is for mixed (beds) where there are ... groups of larger shrubs on corners and elsewhere to give shape to the views and to create surprises.”

— Graham Stuart Thomas

“It is far better to limit our choice to real permanencies, which do not require staking ... and a general mixture throughout of dwarf shrubs, perennials and ground-covers, with bulbs ... This has been called gardening in four layers, and I believe it to be the most satisfying form of gardening.”

— Graham Stuart Thomas

“I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge, or a vigour of spring, as well as an infinite variety of colour that no artefact I have seen in the last sixty years can rival ... each day, as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday.”

— Bernard Berenson

“If on creation's morn the king of heaven
To shrubs and flowers a sovereign lord had given,
O beauteous rose, he had anointed thee
Of shrubs and flowers the sovereign lord to be;
The spotless emblem of unsullied truth,
The smile of beauty and the glow of youth,
The garden's pride, the grace of vernal bowers,
The blush of meadows, and the eye of flowers.”

— Henry George Bohn

“The nature of the place ... whether high or low, moist or dry, whether sloping north or south, or bearing tall trees or low shrubs ... generally gives hint as to its inhabitants.”

— John James Audubon

“Listen to the sermon preached to you by the flowers, the trees, the shrubs, the sky, and the whole world. Notice how they preach to you a sermon full of love, of praise of God, and how they invite you to glorify the sublimity of that sovereign Artist who has given them being.”

— Paul Of The Cross

“The ideal garden is one in which a collection of trees, shrubs and plants have been procured and allotted to the best space available and are so arranged and tended that they are seen to their advantage, each in relation to the other. Every plant, of whatever shape or size, should be chosen not only for its individual merits but for its power to enhance the charms of neighbouring plants by contrast or combination in foliage or in flower colour.”

— Penelope Hobhouse

“Consider the many special delights a lawn affords: soft mattress for a creeping baby; worm hatchery for a robin; croquet or badminton court; baseball diamond; restful green perspectives leading the eye to a background of flower beds, shrubs, or hedge; green shadows - This lawn, a carpet all alive/With shadows flung from leaves' - as changing and as spellbinding as the waves of the sea, whether flecked with sunlight under trees of light foliage, like elm and locust, or deep, dark, solid shade, moving slowly as the tide, under maple and oak. This carpet!”

— Katharine Sergeant Angell White

“When all is said and done, is there any more wonderful sight, any moment when man's reason is nearer to some sort of contact with the nature of the world than the sowing of seeds, the planting of cuttings, the transplanting of shrubs or the grafting of slips?”

— Saint Augustine

“The water-lily, in the midst of waters, opens its leaves and expands its petals, at the first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain-drops with a quicker sympathy than the packed shrubs in the sandy desert.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.”

— Arthur Koestler

“Near yonder copse, where once the garden smil'd,
And still where many a garden flower grows wild,
There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,
The village preacher's modest mansion rose.
A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year;
Remote from town's he ran his godly race,
Nor e'er had chang'd nor wish'd to change his place;
Unskilful he to fawn, or seek for power,
By doctrines fashion'd to the varying hour;
Far other aims his heart had learn'd to prize.
More bent to raise the wretched than to rise.”

— Oliver Goldsmith

“He who lives up to a little light shall have more light; he who lives up to a little knowledge shall have more knowledge; he who lives up to a little faith shall have more faith, and he who lives up to a little love shall have more love. Verily the main reason why men are such babes and shrubs in grace is because they do not live up their attainments.”

— Thomas Brooks

“There is an herb named in Latine Convolvulus (i.e. with wind), growing among shrubs and bushes, with carrieth a flower not unlike to this Lilly, save that it yeeldeth no smell nor hath those chives within; for whitenesse they resemble one another very much, as if Nature in making this floure were a learning and trying her skill how to frame the Lilly indeed.”

— Pliny The Elder

“A blight had fallen on the trees and shrubs; and the wind, at length beginning to break the unnatural stillness that had prevailed all day, sighed heavily from time to time, as though foretelling in grief the ravages of the coming storm. The bat skimmed in fantastic flights through the heavy air, and the ground was alive with crawling things, whose instinct brought them forth to swell and fatten in the rain.”

— Charles Dickens

“Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters
who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity.”

— Washington Irving

“The man to solitude accustom'd long, Perceives in everything that lives a tongue; Not animals alone, but shrubs and trees Have speech for him, and understood with ease, After long drought when rains abundant fall, He hears the herbs and flowers rejoicing all.”

— William Cowper

“I find the love of garden grows upon me as I grow older more and more. Shrubs and flowers and such small gay things, that bloom and please and fade and wither and are gone and we care not for them, are refreshing interests, in life, and if we cannot say never fading pleasures, we may say unreproved pleasures and never grieving losses.”

— Maria Edgeworth