There is no season such delight can bring,
As summer, autumn, winter and the spring.
William Browne, Variety, 1630
A summer’s sun is worth the having.
French Proverb
Dirty hands, iced tea, garden fragrances thick in the air and a blanket of color before me,
who could ask for more?
Bev Adams, Mountain Gardening
No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.
James Russell Lowell
Summer afternoon summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most
beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
It amazes me that most people spend more time planning next summer’s vacation than they
do planning the rest of their lives.
Patricia Fripp
He stood beside a cottage lone
And listened to a lute,
One summer’s eve, when the breeze was gone,
And the nightingale was mute.
Thomas K. Hervey, 1799-1859, The Devil’s Progress
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
Russel Baker
Oh, the summer night
Has a smile of light
And she sits on a sapphire throne.
Barry Cornwall
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat,
and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
Genesis 8: 22
That beautiful season the Summer!
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light;
and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting,
yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains…
Diane Ackerman
Summer makes a silence after spring.
Vita Sackville-West
hot August night;
scent of crushed lantana leaves
thickens the air
Trilby, Modesto, California
There ought to be gardens for all months in the year,
in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season.
Sir Francis Bacon
This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a
first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for
those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and
flower and human shoulders.
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Courting of Sister Wisby, 1887
What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise
of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.
Gertrude Jekyll, On Gardening
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
Wallace Stevens
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur
of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.
John Lubbock
So fades a summer cloud away;
So sinks the gale when storms are o’er;
So gently shuts the eye of day;
So dies a wave along the shore.
Mrs. Barbauld, 1743-1825, The Death of the Virtuous
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a
shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and
glowing, on sea and continues and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
John Muir
I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods.
Robert Frost, Summer Woods
Winter is cold-hearted,
Spring is yea and nay,
Autumn is a weather cock
Blown every way.
Summer days for me
When every leaf is one its tree.
Christina Rosetti
People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
Anton Chekhov
Fairest of the months! Ripe summer’s queen
The hey-day of the year
With robes that gleam with sunny sheen
Sweet August doth appear.
R. Combe Miller
I question not if thrushes sing,
If roses load the air;
Beyond my heart I need not reach
When all is summer there.
John Vance Cheney
Love is to the heart what the summer is to the farmer’s year.
It brings to harvest all the loveliest flowers of the soul.
Billy Graham
How can one help shivering with delight when one’s hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower,
cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor!
Colette
A life without love is like a year without summer.
Swedish Proverb
T’is now the summer of your youth. Time has not cropt the roses from
your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them.
Edward Moore. 1712-1757, The Gamester, Act 3
It is the month of June,
The month of leaves and roses
When pleasant sights salute the eyes,
And pleasant scents the noses.
N.P. Willis
A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing,
and the lawn mower is broken.
James Dent
The old, wooden shed
Stranded in a sea of wheat,
Waiting for harvest.
Daniel Denault
Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life’s a short summer, man a flower;
He dies alas! how soon he dies!
Samuel Johnson. 1709-1784, Winter. An Ode
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
John Cheever
golden barley grass
straw in the wind from summer’s heat
dormant green unseen
Scott, Paso Robles, California
July brings harsh drought
but the sun is ripe; heat as thick
as tomato skins.
kite
How sociable the garden was.
We ate and talked in given light.
The children put their toys to grass
All the warm wakeful August night.
Thom Gunn, Last Days at Teddington
The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.
Elizabeth Lawrence
What a beautiful, sunny morning. It makes you happy to be alive, doesn’t it? We can’t let the sun
outshine us! We have to beam, too!
Takayuki Ikkaku
Warm summer sun, shine kindly here;
Warm southern wind, blow softly here;
Green sod above, lie light, lie light;
Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.
Mark Twain
Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time.
William Cowper
In summer, the song sings itself.
William Carlos Williams
Do what we can, summer will have its flies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We know the past but cannot control it.
We control the future but cannot know it.
Claude Shannon
Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
Francis Thompson, 1859-1907
To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie
True Poems flee
Emily Dickinson
Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure,
and the song of birds.
Carl von Linnaeus
He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
Ben Hecht
Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and
due to be repaid next January.
Hal Borland
The serene philosophy of the pink rose is steadying. Its fragrant, delicate petals open fully and are ready to fall, without regret or disillusion, after only a day in the sun. It is so every summer. One can almost hear their pink, fragrant murmur as they settle down upon the grass: ‘Summer, summer, it will always be summer.’
Rachel Peden
I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.
Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit
If a June night could talk,
it would probably boast it invented romance.
Bern Williams
I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer,
the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter
and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan
Clapping my hands
with the echoes the summer moon
begins to dawn.
Basho
Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is
jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief
that all’s right with the world.
Ada Louise Huxtable
You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good
tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook’s year. I get more excited by
that than anything else.
Mario Batali
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers
Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers.
I sing of maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.
Robert Herrick
O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!
O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths!
O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb!
A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee.
Walt Whitman
Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
Sam Keen
All your renown is like the summer flower that blooms and dies; because the sunny glow which
brings it forth, soon slays with parching power.
Dante Alighieri
We go in withering July
To ply the hard incessant hoe;
Panting beneath the brazen sky
We sweat and grumble, but we go.
Ruth Pitter, 1897-1992, The Diehards, 1941
There is an appointed time for everything.
And there is a time for every event under heaven -
A time to give birth, and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.
Ecclesiastes, 3:1-2
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