Many books use quotations at the heads of their chapters and, frankly, I don’t always find the dollops of Shakespeare or Milton, Jekyll or Sackville-West very inspiring. But in The Living Garden by Jane Powers (full review in a week or two), there are some unusually thoughtful and apposite choices.

They may lose a little of their power, detached from the chapters they introduce, but here’s a few examples anyway:

“Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.”
George Meredith.

“Out of the soil the buds come,
The silent detonations
Of power wielded without sin.”
R. S. Thomas

“I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”
Henry David Thoreau

“A good Garden may have some weeds.”
Thomas Fuller

“Time is what prevents everything happening at once.”
John Archibald Wheeler

Bodes well for the book as a whole, doesn't it.

Read more about The Living Garden by Jane Powers