Garden Design Quotes

“The tragedy of feminine design is that it receives so little official support. Most of the world's design schools, having been organized by men, encourage a masculine approach, even when they are run by women. Yet many designers who are male in the biological sense have a feminine approach to design.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“Many of the world's best-designed cities have been inspired by garden concepts.”
― Tom Turner, Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC – 2000 AD

“The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia.”
― Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, philosophy and design

“Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“There is much to learn about what could happen in the gardens of the future, should designers wish to learn about the past.”
― Tom Turner, Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC – 2000 AD

“Humphry Repton, the leading garden theorist of the nineteenth century, defined a garden as 'a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure or man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated and enriched by art'.”
― Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, philosophy and design

“The flat area immediately below was broken up into a formal pattern of beds containing oleander and more clipped clouds of box, a southern imitation of the grand parterres of aristocratic chateaux. A rose garden beyond was the first in a series of gardens created on descending levels, apparently linked by a magnificently overgrown wisteria. Dense lines of cypress hid any farther areas from view, including the memorial garden that was her special brief. As a whole, the garden was charming, luxuriant, but- from a professional point of view- dilapidated.”
― Deborah Lawrenson, The Sea Garden

“Garden design theory explains, or should explain, the 'What, Where, Why and How' of making gardens.”
― Tom Turner, European Gardens: History, Philosophy and Design

“Having lasted for 4,000 years, the use of nature's materials to express ideas about nature may be expected to continue. The best garden designs are produced with an awareness of the art, science, history, geography, philosophy, social habits and construction techniques of their period.”
― Tom Turner, Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC – 2000 AD

“British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology.”
― Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, philosophy and design

“From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate.”
― Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, philosophy and design

“Charles Jencks is the most notable landscape and garden designer to carry forward the 3500 BCE-1800CE landscape and garden design agenda.”
― Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, philosophy and design

“Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“I rebuke societies that impart to their flowers their cold and rigid demeanour. Flowers should not stand with the stiffness of a soldier on parade but must carry themselves with the relaxedness of a dancer, their arms outstretched above a shaggy mane. Life reveals few sights as distressing as the look of flowers standing mournfully at attention unstirred by the kisses of a million bees. This infection of uncomely reserve is the handiwork of sombre gardeners bred in sombre societies who will not consider their work done till their flowers exude in aspect that stiffness they esteem. They forget that God intended that we mingle with flowers and not merely admire them from afar. But there is a look in a fastidiously manicured garden that makes me keep my distance, a look that draws my eyes but scorns my touch, and that is why I condemn them.”
― Agona Apell, The Success Genome Unravelled: Turning men from rot to rock

“We who trade in landskips see the world not as it is but as it will be. When I walk in the park, which is not yet a park but an expanse of ground hitherto not enhanced but degraded by my work in it, I take little note of the ugly wounds where the earth has been heaved about to make banks and declivities to match those of my plan. I see only that the outline has been soundly drawn for the great picture I have designed. It is for Time to fill it with colour and to add bulk to those spare lines -- Time aided by Light and Weather, I suppose I should say as well, aided by God’s will, but it seems to me that to speak of the Almighty in these days is to invoke misfortune. It is more certain and less contentious to note that Water also is essential.”
― Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Peculiar Ground

“Ambient temperature and sunlight, those are the only elements that big ball of gas in the sky can influence in plant selection, right? Nope!
Soil temperature is a critical component of successful growing, but is far from a dealbreaker.”
― Matt Puchalski, A Pandemic Gardening Journal