1
The underlying melody via every rock, plant, animal, sky and star, inside the water, from the dirt, through the light: only love lasts.Melina Sempill Watts
2
The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only — a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat — but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.Hope Jahren
3
Improving upon nature is the very essence of plant breeding, and so it goes to the heart of one of the central debates of the human condition: the relationship between humanity and nature and the degree to which the human race has a right (or indeed a responsibility) to change plant life for its own ends.Unknown
4
Sometimes shows became almost obsessively obscure, as with the gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa) shows of nineteenth-century Britain, when workingmen in the industrial counties of northern England and the Midlands formed themselves into societies, constituted with presidents, secretaries, and stewards, for the purpose of running gooseberry shows–weight being the decisive factor. Quite why this fruit, always something of a minority taste, should become the subject of what only could be described as a cult remains a mystery.Unknown
5
To Tree’s surprise, e could still feel the blade of Univervia that was on the deer’s tongue. And the feelings that came at Tree were fast, intense and surprising. The whole blade lay languid, surrendering as the tongue mashed the strands of grass up to the roof of the doe’s mouth. Then the deer twisted the grass sideways and ground teeth into the grass. As the grass was destroyed, each cell popped and gave shots of grass life-force into the hungry deer, in little pops of ecstatic release. The whole thing happened as swiftly as a string of firecrackers going off into light and smoke, leaving behind a dull residue that gave no sense of the evanescent beauty that had been enchanting the air only moments before. Tree felt this chunk of Univervia embrace willful dissolution and then suddenly all these little pieces that had been integrated into Univervia were separated into something like ananda, the joy which powers the universe and then.. then the grass was deer.Melina Sempill Watts
6
I wanted a Fakahatchee ghost orchid, in full bloom, maybe attached to a gnarled piece of custard apple tree, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root to be only as wide as a toothpick. I wanted the bloom to be snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth. I knew its shape by heart, the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals, the albino toad with its springy legs. It would not be the biggest or the showiest or the rarest or the finest flower here, except to me, because I wanted it. .Susan Orlean
7
Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.John Ruskin
8
Every plant is an individual. Wrong again. We are not individuals at all, we are all connected. We are individuals the way each blossom on an apple tree is an individual.Dale Pendell