Quotes About Botany

If he does it right and is lucky, in nine or 10 months he scoops the tiny half-inch seedlings out of the bottle and plants them in community pots. A year later he transplants them to individual three-inch pots and in another two years to 4 1/2-inch pots, and crosses his fingers. Then, five or six or seven years since the day he put pollen to stigma, he sees an orchid no one ever saw before. It is different from any orchid that has ever bloomed, including those in the Garden of Eden.

lot of folks think trees are simple things, incapable of doing anything interesting. But there's a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They're learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven't even identified.

Easy Tree IDs.

Trees trade airborne aerosol signals, the article says. They make medicines. Their fragrances

nutmeg's inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant

Trees trade airborne aerosol signals, the article says. They make medicines.

The bright red sap of the fei plant is meant to be useful for blood ailments." "The signature of all things," Alma murmured.

She had envisaged them traveling to Boston together, or perhaps even beyond--as far away as the Alps, climbing over boulders to hunt for pasqueflowers and rock-jasmine. He would say to her, What do you make of this specimen? and she would say, It is fine and rare.

The earth is made of it. Green. Moss, algae, lichen, mould. It's the colour everything was before there were flowers, the colour of the first trees, the trees that didn't have leaves, had needles instead, the trees that grew in the first hiatus between cold and warm -

And with plant species the proportion which has been cultivated is even smaller. From 200,000 higher plant species, only 100 or so are grown for food. And almost all of these were first tended or cultivated in the fourth millennium BC in Europe.

A lot of the flowers I like are weeds. Oh, and dandelions, but they're a weed, too.

A plant has been defined as a living thing that absorbs in microscopic amounts over its surface all that it needs for growth. Through

Ground-elder was introduced to Britain by the Romans for the commendable purpose of relieving gout, doubling as a pot-herb into the bargain. But 2,000 years and several medical revolutions later, it's become the most obstinate and detested weed in the nation's flowerbeds.

bristly oxtongue, a weed whose scabby leaves looked as if they were afflicted by industrial acne.

of different wild flowers and ferns grow.

Botanists who study "twining handedness" have discovered that hops are unusual in their proclivity to twine in a clockwise direction; 90 percent of all climbing plants prefer to go counterclockwise.)

He understood perfectly the connection between booze and botany, which fascinates me as well.

Young shoots contain enough cyanide to kill a horse. Death is mercifully swift, usually caused by cardiac arrest or respiratory failure and preceded by only a few hours of anxiety, convulsions, and staggering about.

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.

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.

Botany, the science of the vegetable kingdom, is one of the most attractive, most useful, and most extensive departments of human knowledge. It is, above every other, the science of beauty.

The names of the plants ought to be stable [certa], consequently they should be given to stable genera.

As we delight in the strange and exotic beauty of orchid flowers, it is salutary to reflect that we are, in essence, looking at their genitalia.

Trees are astonishing communicators." "When they rustle?" "It's more like a kind of bubbly noise. If they're thirsty. Like trying to get the last bits through a straw." "Why isn't everyone absolutely freaking out about this?" said Carmen. "Well, dendrologists are. For years, it was considered absolutely ridiculous to think it. Then studies came along and proved it.