"A garden is an experience. It is not flowers or plants of any kind. It is not flagstones, brick, grass, or pebbles. It is not a barbeque, or a fiberglass screen. It is an experience. If it were possible to distill the essence of a garden, I think it would be the sense of being within something while still out of doors. That is the substance of it; for until you have that, you do not have a garden at all."
- James Rose, Creative Gardens (1958)
"Space is the constant in all three-dimensional design, but a realization of space is not possible until it is defined by materials."
- James Rose, Plant Forms and Space (1939)
"The earth can be modeled, as clay, and is continually modeled and remodeled by the organisms that inhabit it, as well as by water, and wind, making a plastic relation that is forever changing."
- James Rose, Modern American Gardens (1967)
"I don't bring in rocks to use them or to talk to them. Rocks that are there I try to use, instead of digging a hole to bury them as if they were something obscene."
-James Rose, Gardens Make Me Laugh (1965)
"Without a viewer, of course, there is no garden because a garden is what happens to him. It is the landscape formed for him to re-form in his own view; it is being constantly re-formed by the movement of the sun, its own movement, and the movement of the viewer from space to space."
- James Rose, Modern American Gardens (1958)