Quotes About Botany

It has oblique leaves

In this, the people living in the Near East were especially fortunate. There are fifty-six edible grasses growing wild in the world – cereals like wheat, barley, corn and rice. Of those, no fewer than thirty-two grew on the hills and plains of the Fertile Crescent of today's southern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Iraq, compared with just four varieties apiece in Africa and America, and only one native variety, oats, in Western Europe.

If your IQ was one point lower, you'd be a plant,' was Steve's only comment.

All the natural narcotics, stimulants, relaxants and hallucinants known to the modern botanist and pharmacologist were discovered by primitive man and have been in use from time immemorial.

Meanwhile, we stooped and picked the sharp plants

Horticulture is like magic. Endlessly fascinating, sometimes infuriating.

26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.

De Maes went to see him and learned that L'Amoral himself was planning to write to Clusius, to send him a bulb of the martagon pomponii

One French tulip was called a Coquille marbr e, a marbled shell.

double white Narcissus,

Possession of the pure synthetic specimens of the anthocyanidins and chief anthocyanins enabled my wife and me to devise quick tests for these colouring matters which can be used with the material from a few flower petals.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

The edge of a leaf is not simply uneven; there is a glossary of specific words for the appearance of a leaf margin: dentate for large, coarse teeth, serrate for a sawblade edge, serrulate if the teeth are fine and even, ciliate for a fringe along the edge. A leaf folded by accordion pleats is plicate, complanate when flattened as if squashed between two pages of a book. Every nuance of moss architecture has a word.

Mosses are so little known by the general public that only a few have been given common names. Most are known solely by their scientific Latin names, a fact which discourages most people from attempting to identify them. But I like the scientific names, because they are as beautiful and intricate as the plants they name. Indulge yourself in the words, rhythmic and musical, rolling off your tongue: Dolicathecia striatella, Thuidium delicatulum, Barbula fallax.

Most spores can't germinate in the leafy carpet of their own parents

Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany.

Even the surfaces of individual cells have their own descriptors—mammillose for a breast-like swelling, papillose for a little bump, and pluripapillose when there are enough bumps to look like chicken pox. While they may initially seem like arcane technical terms, these words have life to them. What better word for a thick, round shoot, swelling with water than julaceous?

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9: 35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology— trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman's gardens, known by some as "global ecosystems," function.

To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language. Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany.

Roses red and violets blue,And all the sweetest flowers, that in the forest grew.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

I'm clueless when it comes to flowers.

The Chinese, by their favourite system of dwarfing, contrive to make it, when only a foot and a half or two feet high, have all the characters of an aged cedar of Lebanon.

Some apple varieties, such as Jonagold, Stayman, Winesap, and Mutsu, produced sterile pollen, and could never be used as pollenizers. Yet pollen from other varieties could be used to pollinate those pollen-sterile trees. Really, the honey bee did all the work.