Russell Page

“Water in a garden is a magical thing.”

“A garden is the mirror of a mind.”

“The two essentials of a garden are shade and water.”

“For me, a garden is a place of life, a mystery, a creation, a communion.”

“I have used the word ‘formal’... to denote a garden in which the designer has not hesitated to impose his will on the landscape.”

“To be a good gardener is to be a good guest on this earth.”

“The most important tool in the gardener's kit is the sharpened pencil.”

“All gardening is landscape painting.”

“Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart.”

“Garden-making, like gardening itself, concerns the relationship of the human being to his natural surroundings.”

“I hold that the best purpose of a garden is to give delight and to refresh the spirit.”

“In any garden, it is on the detail that success or failure depends.”

“Order, in a garden, is not rigidity, but the observable manifestation of a unifying idea.”

“The main purpose of a garden is to look as if it had always been there.”

“Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.”

“All my life I have been making gardens and I have never ceased to learn.”

“I like to think of my work as a kind of controlled freedom.”

“The skeleton of a garden is its layout and the planting is its flesh.”

“To design a garden is to be a host to nature.”

“The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.”