Mirabel Osler

“Reading books about gardens is a potent pastime; books nourish a gardener's mind in the same way as manure nourishes plants.”

— Mirabel Osler

Sitting in your garden is a feat to be worked at with unflagging determination and single-mindedness. . . . I am deeply…

— Mirabel Osler

Green thoughts emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released.

— Mirabel Osler

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you…

— Mirabel Osler

There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished.…

— Mirabel Osler

As for garden photographers, how differently they see things. With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty…

— Mirabel Osler

Have you ever noticed how few sitting places you find in private gardens? How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is…

— Mirabel Osler

Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place on seats…

— Mirabel Osler

Crouchers move through a garden at a stoop: naming, gasping, horraying, admiring or coveting plants; Gapers saunter, smiling or sighing at what…

— Mirabel Osler

“I'm not a garden expert in any sense of the meaning, only someone who blunders about in the shrubbery.”

— Mirabel Osler

At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous.

— Mirabel Osler

To be able to walk under the branches of a tree that you have planted is really to feel you have arrived…

— Mirabel Osler

When the ice of winter holds the house in its rigid grip, when curtains are drawn against that vast frozen waste of…

— Mirabel Osler