Life & Wisdom Quote by May Sarton

A garden is the rare place where hope and grief share the same dirt. Sarton turns that everyday truth into a compact philosophy: growth is not a feel-good metaphor but a bargain, and the price is loss. The line works because it refuses the sentimental version of nature as pure consolation. “Growth and change” arrive as a coupled force, almost bureaucratic in its inevitability, and the pivot - “that means loss as well” - lands like an unsparing footnote to optimism.

Sarton’s phrasing keeps the emotional register honest. “Treasures” suggests wonder without demanding grandness; a new bud, a volunteer seedling, a scent after rain can count. Against that, “a few disasters” is deliberately casual, the understatement of someone who has watched blight, frost, pests, and human misjudgment wreck a season. It’s wry in the way gardeners are wry: you can’t cultivate without courting catastrophe. The sentence doesn’t deny pain; it places pain inside a cycle that continues, indifferent but not pointless.

Context matters: Sarton wrote often from the vantage of solitude and domestic rituals, using gardens as both literal practice and psychic mirror. Here the subtext is resilience without heroics. The garden doesn’t “teach” you through moralizing; it trains you through repetition. You learn to mourn what’s gone, then keep tending anyway, because new life is not compensation so much as continuation.