Quotes from Amy Stewart

It's been speculated—though the evidence is sketchy—that a sudden flooding of the Black Sea toward the end of meltwater pulse 1C, around 7,500 years ago, inspired the deluge story in Genesis.

The first boozy concoction to come from apples was cider. Americans refer to unfiltered apple juice as apple cider and usually drink it hot with a cinnamon stick. But ask for cider in other parts of the world and you'll get something far better: a drink as dry and bubbly as Champagne and as cold and refreshing as beer. When we drink it at all in North America, we call it hard cider to distinguish it from the nonalcoholic version, but such a distinction isn't necessary elsewhere.

I'm going to look for the compliment buried in that remark

We may therefore infer—" he writes, "improbable as is the inference—that worms are able by some means to judge which is the best end by which to draw triangles of paper into their burrows.

For the past several years, the daily high-water mark in the Miami area has been racing up at the rate of almost an inch a year, nearly 10 times the rate of average global sea-level rise.

The Aztec Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, one of the few pre-Columbian books not destroyed by the Spanish, portray Mayahuel, goddess of the agave, breast-feeding her drunken rabbit children, presumably offering them pulque instead of milk.

People ask me, why bother cataloging earthworms? Well, why catalog anything? It's how we learn about the world we live in. Besides, some of these worms are going extinct. How do you know what you're losing if you don't know what you have?

Among the many benefits of "limestone water" was the fact that it came out of the ground at about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, the perfect temperature for the cooling and condensation process in the days before refrigeration. The higher pH level inhibited iron particles that can give whiskey a bitter taste. And it is possible that the elevated levels of calcium, magnesium, and phosphate encouraged the growth of lactobacillus, a bacteria that plays a role in fermentation.

But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you're left with, at the end of the day, is this: a stretch of freshly turned dirt, a handful of seeds scratched into the surface, and a marker to remember where they went. It is at the same time an incredibly brave and an incredibly simple thing to do, entrusting your seeds to the earth and waiting for them to rise up out of the ground to meet you.

People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite.

The male doesn't eat - it doesn't even have a mouth or an anus - so it does nothing but mate until death.

It didn't help that Norma had all the girlish charm of a boulder

A poisonous seed will only kill you if you chew it and swallow.

Eternity can be found in the minuscule, in the place where earthworms, along with billions of unseen soil-dwelling microorganisms, engage in a complex and little-understood dance with the tangle of plant roots that make up their gardens, their cities.

Gardeners are the ultimate mixologists.

I'd always felt that one could read a woman's discontent in the amount of embroidery in her sitting room. It gave me a crowded and nervous feeling to sit among so much frantic stitchery.

Perhaps it makes sense that a creature that doesn't get ill and has few enemies among its neighbors would also live agelessly and die without explanation or cause--would simply vanish without a trace.

The rat population thrived in such a horrible mess. Ironically, cats were believed to be the consorts of witches in those days, so they were killed. Persecution of cats during the Middle Ages nearly eliminated populations of the rat's natural predator, just when Europeans could have used the cats' hunting skills the most.

But a male tree produces only small, well-behaved flowers—that is, if your definition of well behaved includes spewing plant sperm into the air for weeks on end.

Any environment, any single life is in a continuous state of change. This is just more obvious when you pay attention to earthworms. Their work may seem unspectacular at first. They don't chirp or sing, they don't gallop or soar, they don't hunt or make tools or write books. But they do something just as powerful: they consume, they transform, they change the earth.

I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better.

Some growers believe that a particular type of music makes the plants grow faster, but most agree that the best strategy for the plants is to play whatever music the workers like best.

Drunken botanists? Given the role they play in creating the world's great drinks, it's a wonder there are any sober botanists at all.

If bacteria can be pictured as teeming black ants under the microscope, imagine fungi as gossamer spider webs. These organisms form long threads called hyphae that stretch between plant roots. Some form into even larger masses called mycelium that can span an entire backyard.