“Where you tend a rose my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”
Variant: Two things cannot be in one place. Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.
Source: The Secret Garden
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Frances Hodgson Burnett 56
English-American childrens' playwright and author 1849–1924Related quotes

Recalled in a letter from Joshua Speed in Herndon's Lincoln (1890), p. 527 http://books.google.com/books?id=rywOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA527&dq=%22plucked+a+thistle+and+planted+a+flower%22
Posthumous attributions

"Magnus and Morna", in Thirty Years, Poems New and Old (1880)

Queen of the Slipstream
Song lyrics, Poetic Champions Compose (1987)

“Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say;
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?”
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

“Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say;
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?”
The Rubaiyat (1120)