SundayJan 18, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Mirabel Osler is an English writer. Her book A Gentle Plea for Chaos is based on her experiences in her garden in Shropshire.
To be able to walk under the branches of a tree that you have planted is really to feel you have arrived with your garden. So far we are on the way: we can now stand beside ours.
There is no 'The End' to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished; a painter can frame his picture, a composer notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move.
There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.
Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality, are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens, why not in our own.
Sitting in your garden is a feat to be worked at with unflagging determination and single-mindedness. ... I am deeply committed to sitting in the garden.
Have you ever noticed how few sitting places you find in private gardens? How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting, never stop ... To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an outrage towards every felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden.
As for garden photographers, how differently they see things. With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty with its discriminating lens. The naked eye can't censor some ugly sight on the periphery of vision; the photographer takes the perfect shot and picks for us just what we need to see.
Crouchers move through a garden at a stoop: naming, gasping, horraying, admiring or coveting plants; Gapers saunter, smiling or sighing at what they find, succumbing to an intangible beatitude that takes them for a brief escape into another dimension. Both sorts of gardener are besotted; both get their hands dirty; think and talk gardening; but on the threshold of another's garden, each use a different set of whiskers.
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