Violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive - none of it very subtle: Ethel [Smyth] didn't deal in pastel shades, she went for the stronger colors, the blood-red, anything deep and pumping out of the arteries of the heart.

Vita Sackville-West

Categorized in : Integrity Loyalty Horse

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.

Vita Sackville-West

optimistic garden funny

The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.

Vita Sackville-West

learning education knowledge

I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.

Vita Sackville-West

summer spring love

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

Vita Sackville-West

long-distance-relationship missing love

A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking; but even a solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.

Vita Sackville-West

flower may thinking

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

Vita Sackville-West

experience success years

There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree

Vita Sackville-West

passion marriage love

Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, When I have no engagements written on my block, When no one comes to disturb my inward peace, When no one comes to take me away from myself And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, Being so contrived that it takes too long a time To get myself back to myself when they have gone.

Vita Sackville-West

block mirrors reflection

Flowers really do intoxicate me.

Vita Sackville-West

flower

I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.

Vita Sackville-West

clever love-you art

I like muddling things up; and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.

Vita Sackville-West

nice long art

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

Vita Sackville-West

writing time life

Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.

Vita Sackville-West

gardening taste successful

It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June. Larger than any rose,

Vita Sackville-West

summer book fall

A good start in life is as important to plants as it is to children: they must develop strong roots in a congenial soil, otherwise they will never make the growth that will serve them richly according to their needs in their adult life.

Vita Sackville-West

strong roots children

But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.

Vita Sackville-West

gardening color use

Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.

Vita Sackville-West

ambitious safety hate

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

Vita Sackville-West

gardener gardening would-be

Not seeing is half-believing.

Vita Sackville-West

half inspirational believe

The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.

Vita Sackville-West

gardening luxury two