Love Quote by Gertrude Jekyll

Gardening, in Gertrude Jekyll's hands, isn’t a genteel hobby; it’s an addiction with good PR. Calling it a “seed once sown” is more than a cute metaphor. It’s a sly declaration that taste can be trained, then made permanent. You don’t just pick up gardening and set it down like a parlor game. Once you’ve felt the small thrill of coaxing life out of dirt, it rewires how you see time, failure, and control.

The line works because it collapses two kinds of permanence: the biological (seeds persist, self-sow, return) and the psychological (desire becomes habit, habit becomes identity). “Never dies” is the bold part. Gardens are, famously, about death: frost, rot, blight, a slug’s overnight vandalism. Jekyll counters that reality by relocating endurance from the plants to the person. The garden may perish; the gardener doesn’t stop wanting.

Context matters here. Jekyll wasn’t just dabbling; she helped define an era of English garden design that prized cultivated “naturalness” and the long view of seasons. In a world accelerating toward modernity, gardening offered a counter-logic: progress measured in slow increments, attention as a moral stance. The subtext is quietly aspirational: if you can learn to care for a border of delphiniums year after year, you can learn to care about anything in a deeper, more disciplined way.