flowers are not made by singing "Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade.
- Rudyard Kipling
Earth laughs in flowers.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden,
I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones,
less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak,
one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's,
because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time,
harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.
- Marcel Proust
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with elgantine.
- William Shakespeare