Love Quote by Alexander Smith

Smith’s line flatters the reader by treating a private hobby as a species-level instinct. The phrasing “deeply seated” makes the preference for gardens feel anatomical, not fashionable: gardening isn’t a pastime you pick up, it’s something lodged in the “human heart,” as intimate and stubborn as appetite. That rhetorical move matters in a 19th-century context where industrial cities were swelling, soot was literally settling, and “nature” was increasingly something you visited rather than inhabited. The garden becomes a domesticated counterworld: controlled, legible, morally reassuring.

The sentence also smuggles in a quiet argument about what counts as civilized desire. Smith doesn’t say people like wilderness. He says they like gardens and gardening - nature with a border, nature disciplined into beds and paths, nature you can improve. The subtext is Victorian and reformist: cultivation as character. To garden is to practice patience, stewardship, and incremental labor; to admire gardens is to admit a hunger for order that doesn’t feel like coercion because it arrives as beauty.

There’s a democratic sheen, too. By locating the impulse in “the human heart,” Smith universalizes an experience that, historically, was unequally available. In doing so he turns access into aspiration: even if you don’t own land, you’re meant to recognize yourself in the longing for a small, tended patch of green. The quote works because it takes a gentle pleasure and frames it as evidence of our better, calmer selves - a soft rebuke to the noise outside the garden gate.