By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

As Winston Churchill wrote in Roving Commission: My Early Life, “quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts.” Taking a cue from that, I’ve collected garden-related quotes for years. Here then is fuel for good garden thoughts, some serious, some not (you decide).

Gardening
Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.
  —Mac Griswold (She is a garden historian who writes for the NY Times and Houghton Mifflin)

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. . . . But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.
  —Thomas Jefferson, 1811

Nature writes. Gardeners edit.
  —Roger Swain

Color
Magenta is the floral form of original sin.
  —Gertrude Jekyll

Fertilizer
The best fertilizer is the shadow of a man.
  —Idaho farmer (also said to be an old Chinese proverb)

Japanese style gardening
A Japanese garden is finished when there is nothing left to remove.
  —Common saying related by David De Groot of Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection

Bonsai is the art of potbound plants.
  —Bob Denman, Red Pig Tools

Perennials
A perennial is a plant which, had it lived, would have come back to rebloom year after year.
  —Panayoti Kelaidis, Denver Botanic Garden

Plant breeding
Plant breeding is having a huge knife and cutting away what you don't want.
  —Maartin Benship, Dutch bulb breeder

Trees
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot defend themselves or run away. And few destroyers of trees ever plant any …
  —John Muir

An apple tree does not grow apples to prove that it is an apple tree; it does it because it is an apple tree.
  —Phil Williams, 1980

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
  —Anon