“When cultivating your garden, keep the soil healthy with encroachers. The most redolent flowers grow over graves.”

“Our most important job as vegetable gardeners is to feed and sustain soil life, often called the soil food web, beginning with the microbes. If we do this, our plants will thrive, we’ll grow nutritious, healthy food, and our soil conditions will get better each year. This is what is meant by the adage ”Feed the soil not the plants.”

“On rich soils only abundant harvests of produce for ordinary consumption grow. On poor soils the most misshapen trees, and flowers of the rarest, the subtlest colours and scents are to be found.”

“I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs himself into the earth and leaves the sight of what is on it to us gaping good-for-nothings. He lives buried in the ground. He builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say: "Good Lord, what humus!”

“Disappointments are like weeds in the garden. You can let them grow and take over your life, or you can rout them out and let the flowers sprout.”

“We shove the dirt over the book, tamping down the disturbed soil. The grass will grow back soon enough. It will be for us the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”