Quotes About Plants

When we borrow the antibiotic compounds from plants, we do better to borrow them all, not just the single solitary most powerful among them. We lose the synergy when we take out the solitary compound. But most important, we facilitate the enemy, the germ, in its ability to outwit the monochemical medicine. The polychemical synergistic mix, concentrating the powers already evolved in medicinal plants, may be our best hope for confronting drug-resistant bacteria.

for bacteria do not develop resistance to plant medicines. They can't. For plants have been dealing with bacteria a great deal longer than the human species has even existed, some 700 million years.

complex organisms the head, or anterior pole of the body, is the part that processes information, the posterior pole the part that engages in sexual reproduction and excretion of waste. From that orientation plants live with their heads in the Earth, their asses in the air. We love the smell, usually, of their reproductive organs and pick them to give to our beloveds (a highly suggestive though unconscious act).

Many African practitioners are expert herbalists and have an encyclopedic knowledge of the plants, mushrooms, toadstools, and other fungi of their region.

The species name is kind of like your own first name (except it comes last in a plant's botanical name). The genus name is similar to your family name (except in botanical names, it comes first).

The water needs of perennials vary. Some are moisture-lovers, others are drought-tolerant, and many are somewhere

A hybrid plant is the result of the cross-pollination between two genetically different plants, usually of the same species but different varieties. This combination can happen because of cultivation, or it can occur naturally through bee pollination between two different plants.

I have to admit that fertilizing the majority of perennials isn't mandatory. If you plant them in soil that suits them (and do your homework when choosing the plants), they may do just fine without it. Good, organically rich soil and good growing conditions and regular water can sustain healthy, hearty perennial growth for quite some time.

So, what, exactly are perennials? They're long-lived herbaceous (non-woody) plants — flowers and herbs, mainly. How long they last depends on the plant and the conditions in your garden.

They're especially nice for shady areas where lawn won't grow.

Much as Africa has leapfrogged straight to mobile phones, it has the opportunity to skip the dirty, grid-tied power plants that currently operate across the developed world and go straight to clean, distributed power.

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

as much about the human desires that connect us to these plants as it is about the plants themselves.

What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. Karl Marx may have gotten in backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.

keep coming back to that image of John Chapman floating down the Ohio River, snoozing alongside his mountain of apple seeds—seeds that held sleeping within them the apple's American future, the golden age to come. The barefoot crank knew something about how things stand between us and the plants, something we seem to have lost sight of in the two centuries since. He understood, I think, that our destinies on the river of natural history are twined.

Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice—reducing food or drug plants to their most salient chemical compounds—can lead to problems.

Only cactuses had perennial appeal. And cactuses were of no interest to her.

I love the farm, I love growing stuff.

I love paperwhites - they smell heavenly and you can often pick them up from a big home improvement store garden center already planted in pretty terra cotta pots.

Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

The absence of suffocating humidity and carnivorous plants was appreciated.

Since plants pull minerals from the soils—micronutrients essential for human health—they serve as a conduit, taking the soil—the environment—putting it into a digestible form, and passing it on to us. Each time we take a bite of food, part of the environment literally becomes part of our biological fabric, our bodies. At the risk of sounding like a hippy, the Earth is part of us.

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.

When you take into your life the gnosis of the light-filled vegetables, the psychedelic plants that have stabilized the sane societies of this world for millennia, the first message that comes to you is: You are a divine being. You matter. You count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.