Kew Gardens Quotes

“Stand in nature before anyone else has woken and most people find something to believe in.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“I don't want to return to the world outside these Gardens. All I want is to notice the dew on a leaf. The holy busyness of worms in the soil.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“They talked in the supermarket, the butcher's and the post office of how they had watched a child collecting twigs, or was it flowers...? How they had noticed the sky, what a blue sky there was that day. Chloe remembers her walking through the trees, the branches growing bigger until she couldn't see her any more. A child had been lost and Kew would never be the same.”
― Tor Udall, A Thousand Paper Birds

“There was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then–but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.”
― Virginia Wolf

“She'd headed out early, walking the short distance to Kew Gardens and arriving as it opened, taking an hour to explore the grounds before her meeting. The huge expanses of green immediately soothed her as she wandered. She barely scratched the surface of what the great gardens had to offer, but gazed in awe at the spectacular Alpine House, the elegant Nash Conservatory, and sweltered in the giant Victorian glasshouse. She stopped to admire the succulent garden and the giant lilies in the Waterlily House, some of the pads of the Victoria amazonica more than a meter across, before wandering into the Rose Pergola, through a tunnel of blooms, rambling roses--- including the 'Danse Des Sylphes' and the pink-blossomed 'Mary Wallace', she read--- trained to climb in an arch over her head.”
― Kayte Nunn, The Botanist's Daughter