Quotes About Botany

I have always been fascinated by plants. I have always preferred plants to human beings. They give me an enormous amount of solace.

In the early 1900s, a Florida farmer found a notable bud sport while inspecting his grove of Walters grapefruit trees. Tree after tree bore white fruit, except one. On that tree, the farmer spotted a branch weighed down with pink fruits. From that single bud sport, all pink grapefruits descend.

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. --The Fruit Hunters

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

jessamine. Flowering

Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.

The true rose, the miracle of nature, owed nothing to the hand of man.

The main stem was then in most cases twisted in a zigzag form, which process checked the flow of the sap, and at the same time encouraged the production of side branches at those parts of the stem where they were most desired.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.

Where flowers degenerate man cannot live.

Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool—maybe the tool—for human betterment. Not all sciences were equally valuable, as he liked to explain. "Botany," he said, "is the most important of all sciences, and plant pathology is one of its most essential branches.

in the Middle East, for example, the wild barley harvest from a small piece of land can feed a family. By contrast, no wild maize ancestor has ever been found, despite decades of search.

Maize is one of the few farm species that is more diverse than most wild plants.

Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the Johnny Appleseed of S. tuberosum.

They're specialists, the whole lot of them, and they don't believe in a method of work which cuts into every field of science from botany to archaeology. They limit their own scope in order to be able to dig in the depths with more concentration for details. Modern research demands that every special branch shall dig in its own hole. It's not usual for anyone to sort out what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together.

Must look into the botanical background of substance known as hashish, I jotted in my journal, writing by the light of candles that grew incessantly jewel-like even as protean wafts of incense approached my snout like platters of ripe fruits borne on the back of Nubian pages.

He could not tell all of the California pines apart, the gray pine from the coulter, the bushop from the knobcone and the Monterey.

The Latin names of plants blur like belief.

Aspirin is so good for roses. Drachma pieces for the chrysanthemums, aspirin for roses, brandy for sweet peas, and a squeeze of lemon-juice for the fleshy flowers, like begonias.

Why don't you get a haircut; you look like a chrysanthemum.

most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossils and wrote about botany and invented household tools and studied animals. He was an amateur anthropologist and even an amateur theologian who famously cut all the miracles out of the New Testament because he thought Jesus made a whole lot more sense without the supernatural material mucking up the good moral philosophy.

Low grass and green moss covered soil that, come summer, would turn arid and cracked. Cyclamens peeked out from under the shelter of rocks, pink and shy as brides. Along the path, tall stalks of purple brush-head flowers swayed in the breeze like a flock of hooded priests on the Via Dolorosa.

I first began to dry specimens for preservation carelessly perhaps at first, but before the season was over, I had collected between one and two hundred species.