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Plants Quotes

Browse 212 quotes about Plants.

Plants Quotes

“Our experience of nature is becoming more and more about what we see on our screens, and less about actually being outside and experiencing it for ourselves. Crouched on the fellside, nose to flower with Purple Saxifrage, I had felt such wonder at just being present with another organism, the kind you can only experience when you’re there, on the mountainside, or in the meadow, or under the trees. It’s impossible to get that same, raw feeling from a television documentary, from our social media feeds or even from a book like this one. True appreciation of nature requires us to form real life bonds with it. [...] I think plants can offer us a lot in this regard, and the fact they can’t move actually allows us to spend time with them in a way that you just can’t with many animals.”

NatureNature QuotesPlantsNatures BeautyNature WritingPlant QuotesConnection To Nature
Book:Where the Wildflowers Grow: My Botanical Journey through Britain and Ireland
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“They drank from a spring which filled an ancient stone trough behind the ruin. Beyond it lay overgrown beds and plants John had never set eyes on before: tall resinous fronds, prickly shrubs, long grey-green leaves hot to the tongue. Nestling among them he found the root whose scent drifted among the trees like a ghost, sweet and tarry. He knelt and pressed it to his nose. 'That was called silphium.' His mother stood behind him. 'It grew in Saturnus's first garden.' She showed him the most ancient trees in the orchards, their gnarled trunks cloaked in grey lichen. Palm trees had grown there too once, she claimed. Now even their stumps had gone. Each day, John left the hearth to forage in the wreckage of Belicca's gardens. His nose guided him through the woods. Beyond the chestnut avenue, the wild skirrets, alexanders and broom grew in drifts. John chased after rabbits or climbed trees in search of birds' eggs. He returned with mallow seeds or chestnuts that they pounded into meal then mixed with water and baked on sticks. The unseasonal orchards yielded tiny red and gold-streaked apples, hard green pears and sour yellow cherries.”

ForestPlantsFruitsScentsMother And SonOrchardsJohn SaturnallSilphium
Book:John Saturnall's Feast
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“John scrambled up and down the terraces and banks, hunting out the secret breaks in the thickets or crawling through hollows woven from sharp-spined stems. Blackberries lured him into sun-pricked chambers. Old byways closed and new ones opened, drifts of nettles surging forward then dying back. The sun beat down until the grass on the green parched. But on the high slopes the rank stems sprang up as lush as ever. Springs ran beneath the turf, his mother told him. Enough water to fill a river. Together they pulled peppery watercress from the edges of marshy puddles and grubbed up tiny sweet carrots, dark purple under the dusty earth. Clover petals yielded honey-beads and jellylike mallow seeds savored of nuts. Tiny strawberries sheltered under ragged leaves and sweet blackberries swelled behind palisades of finger-pricking thorns.”

ForestPlantsFruitsMother And SonVegetationJohn Saturnall
Book:John Saturnall's Feast
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“Gian Pero Frau, one of the most important characters in the supporting cast surrounding S'Apposentu, runs an experimental farm down the road from the restaurant. His vegetable garden looks like nature's version of a teenager's bedroom, a rebellious mess of branches and leaves and twisted barnyard wire. A low, droning buzz fills the air. "Sorry about the bugs," he says, a cartoonish cloud orbiting his head. But beneath the chaos a bloom of biodynamic order sprouts from the earth. He uses nothing but dirt and water and careful observation to sustain life here. Every leaf and branch has its place in this garden; nothing is random. Pockets of lettuce, cabbage, fennel, and flowers grow in dense clusters together; on the other end, summer squash, carrots, and eggplant do their leafy dance. "This garden is built on synergy. You plant four or five plants in a close space, and they support each other. It might take thirty or forty days instead of twenty to get it right, but the flavor is deeper." (There's a metaphor in here somewhere, about his new life Roberto is forging in the Sardinian countryside.) "He's my hero," says Roberto about Gian Piero. "He listens, quietly processes what I'm asking for, then brings it to life. Which doesn't happen in places like Siddi." Together, they're creating a new expression of Sardinian terreno, crossing genetic material, drying vegetables and legumes under a variety of conditions, and experimenting with harvesting times that give Roberto a whole new tool kit back in the kitchen. We stand in the center of the garden, crunching on celery and lettuce leaves, biting into zucchini and popping peas from their shells- an improvised salad, a biodynamic breakfast that tastes of some future slowly forming in the tangle of roots and leaves around us.”

NatureGardenVegetablesPlantsSynergyVegetationEarthySardinia
Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“Sow the seeds of hard work and you will reap the fruits of success. Find something to do, do it with all your concentration. You will excel.”

InspirationalMotivationalSuccessWorkMoneySuccessfulFocusHard WorkSucceedPlantExcellenceInvestmentFruitFood For ThoughtIsraelmore AyivorSeedsPersonal DevelopmentExcellentConcentrationSuccessful PeopleHarvestWork HardReapPlantsInvestSeedInspirationsFruitsExcelMotivationsSowHarvest TimeHarvestingCropBumper Harvest
Book:Become a Better You
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“In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight—unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry.”

ResistancePlantsPesticidesCoevolution
Book:The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
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“Organic foods are richer in nutrients. This means they improve satiety and naturally help regulate body weight…Plants produce antioxidants to protect themselves from pests like insects and to withstand harsh weather. When they’re treated with chemicals such as pesticides, they don’t need to produce as much of their own natural defenses, so the levels are lower.” (p.203)”

WeatherChemicalsInsectsPlantsNutrientsPesticidesSatietyBody WeightAntioxidantsNatural DefensesOrganic Foods
Book:Cinch! Conquer Cravings, Drop Pounds, and Lose Inches
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“Trees are affected by many factors. Global warming is changing rainfall, humidity, air composition, solar radiation, heating and cooling. Plants are sensitive to any of these factors. When all of the factors start to change at once, it may lead to devastation in the plant world.”

WorldChangeAirFactorsSensitiveRadiationCompositionTreesPlantsSolarGlobalDevastationChangingHeatingCoolingWarmingRainfallHumidity
Book:Solar Radiation, Global Warming and Human Disease
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“The plants are our greatest friends. They give us oxygen to breathe, food, water, shelter, medicine, and even fuel. You may enslave a pet with domesticity, a dog or cat, but eventually when the food runs out, they will be gone, by choice. The plants, however, never leave us. Perhaps that is why they have already begun to reduce carbon dioxide, the gas of life, and sunlight by way of chemical trails in the sky.”

SunlightTreesPlantsCarbon DioxideTree QuotesPlant QuotesSunlight QuotesChem TrailsChemical TrailsGas Of Life
Author:Jack Freestone
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“We don’t want to live our lives on autopilot and wake up one day and think, “Man, where did my life go”? By being intentional about starting our day, we can be more productive, less stressed people by making time for the things that make us happy and fulfilled.”

WellnessSelf CarePlantsJournalingAyurvedaSkincareBody And MindAromatherapySlow LivingAll Natural
Book:Radiance and Ritual: Skincare and Self-Care for the Winter Season
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“Ordering online was all about ticking boxes. Species. Color. Size. Number. Grade of quality. Degree of openness. But there was something miraculous about seeing the flowers she'd imagined brought to life. Roses from Columbia. Chrysanthemums from Ecuador. Orchids from Thailand. Anemones and agapanthus from Spain. Stargazers and parrot tulips from the vast Dutch flower fields.”

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Book:The Flower Arrangement
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“They had left the buckets of stemmed flowers and now found themselves in the center of the indoor succulent section, an array of miniature plants with whimsical names such as burro's tail and flaming katy. Olive slowed her pace, taking her time perusing metal racks of each variety. She stooped down and plucked a container of a sweet, blossom-shaped plant. "What's that one?" Julia asked. She liked the look of its pink-edged tips, whose color reminded her of a radish. "This guy here is called roseum. It likes the sun, so I'd have to think of a spot near a window. But it's a nice touch of color among all the green. At different times of year, it develops clusters of light-pink star-shaped flowers. I like it because it adds texture next to something like, say, that jade plant, which is more like a stocky little tree. If I place them together, it adds interest." "Wow. That sounds great." Olive brightened. "Thanks. And then, see these here?" She pointed to a miniature plant with chubby, rosette-style leaves. "Yes?" Julia leaned closer and squinted to read the sign. "The one that says 'Sedum Golden Glow'?" "Yes. That one. I'm thinking of getting a few of those guys and placing them on the dining table in these cool little glass-and-gold terrariums I found online. They have delicate little panes of glass set against metal frames that catch your eye, and they're fancy enough for Mom's taste. She's okay if I do rustic, but she always wants a touch of something expensive mixed in. The terrariums do the trick, I think.”

PlantsColors Of NatureSucculentsSucculentFloral ArrangementsTerrariums
Book:The Second Chance Supper Club
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“When Flury looked at the plants under a confocal microscope, which shines lasers that make the fluorescent dye in the plastics glow, he found particles had attached to the roots but hadn't penetrated them. So this is worrisome in that plastics might be accumulating around the roots we eat-carrots, sweet potatoes, radishes but it's good news in that neither a fibrous nor taproot system seemed to uptake plastic into the plant itself, unlike how crops readily soak up nutrients like nitrogen and iron. "The plant has probably an incentive to take up an iron particle, whereas a plastic particle will not be used by the plant," says Flury. This contradicts previous lab studies on wheat and other crops, like beans and onions and lettuce, showing that roots do take up plastics. Over at ETH Zürich, analytical chemist Denise Mitrano took a different tack, tagging nanoplastics not with fluorescence but with the rare metal palladium. And instead of growing wheat in agar, she grew it hydroponically, exposing the growing plants to the "doped" particles. She could then track the nanoplastics as the wheat plants took them up into their roots and shoots. "We didn't let the wheat go to grains, so we don't know if the nanoplastic would eventually get into the food source, but it did go up further into the plant," says Mitrano. However, she didn't see any big changes in the physiology of the plants, like growth rate or chlorophyl production. "But we did see that it changed the root structure a bit and the cellular structure in the root, which would indicate that the plant was still under stress.”

FarmingPlantsMicroplastics
Book:A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies
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“This is God's universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors in his garden,then what would be a rainbow with only one color? Or a garden with only one kind of flower? Why would the Creator create a vast assortment of plants, ethnicities, and animals, if only one beast or seed is to dominate all of existence?”

PeopleWorldLifeReligionUniversePeaceNatureRaceMankindColorEqualRacismHumanGardenUnityEqualityGenderPeacefulBeastAnimalsRainbowFlowersSuperiorityDominationGardenerInferiorityEthnicityPlantsSuzy KassemCoexistenceCoexistSeedExistColors Of LifeRacialEthicCoexisting TogetherCoexistência
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“As I grow wiser and more skeptical, I realize that almost everything in nomenclature comes full circle. The question remains whether I can outlast the taxonomists.”

WisdomSkepticismWiserPlantsNomenclatureTaxonomyViburnumDirrPlant Identification
Book:Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses
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“Much as I'd always enjoyed the balm of the plants and flowers, it had never occurred to me to aspire to work in here. I suppose I've been so single-mindedly committed to the animals, with their flesh-and-blood needs and their inescapable demands, that these other gentler living things have been obscured to me. I regret that now. There was always so much more than I have allowed myself to see.”

AbundanceAnimalsFlowersLiving ThingsPlantsFloraFauna
Book:The Island of Last Things
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“At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds.”

VoiceFlowersPlantsTellerWeiselFrederick Weisel
Book:Teller
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“I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa's paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering peaks of P. S. [perpetual snow] that, here shoot up on all hands there is little difference in the mt scenery—here however the blaze of Rhod. flowers and various colored jungle proclaims a differently constituted region in a naturalist's eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from? [Letter to Charles Darwin 24 Jun 1849]”

ScienceNatureBiologySceneryNaturalismPlantsOrigin Of LifeRosaOrigin Of SpeciesDarwinCharles DarwinSalvator Rosa
Book:Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker O.M., G.C.S.I.
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“If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life. The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.”

LifeManAnimalsOrganismsPlants
Book:Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering
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“Roses climbed the shed, entwined with dark purple clematis, leaves as glossy as satin. There were no thorns. Patience's cupboard was overflowing with remedies, and the little barn was often crowded with seekers. The half acre of meadow was wild with cosmos and lupine, coreopsis, and sweet William. Basil, thyme, coriander, and broad leaf parsley grew in billowing clouds of green; the smell so fresh your mouth watered and you began to plan the next meal. Cucumbers spilled out of the raised beds, fighting for space with the peas and beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and bright yellow peppers. The cart was righted out by the road and was soon bowed under glass jars and tin pails of sunflowers, zinnias, dahlias, and salvia. Pears, apples, and out-of-season apricots sat in balsa wood baskets in the shade, and watermelons, some with pink flesh, some with yellow, all sweet and seedless, lined the willow fence.”

FlowersHerbsNurseryPlantsFruits And VegetablesVegetationFruit Trees
Book:The Sparrow Sisters
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“Seeing as it's cherry season, I've gone for an imitation of a lunchbox from a blossom-viewing picnic. On top of that folded kaishi paper is the wild vegetable tempura. Ostrich fern, mugwort, devil's walking stick, koshiabura and smilax. There's some matcha salt on the side, or you can try it with the regular dipping sauce. The sashimi is cherry bass and halfbeak. Try it with the ponzu. For the grilled fish dish, I've gone with masu salmon in a miso marinade, together with some simmered young bamboo. Firefly squid and wakame seaweed dressed with vinegared miso, overnight Omi beef, and deep-fried chicken wing-tips. In that wooden bowl is an Asari clam and bamboo shoot broth.”

SeafoodPlantsJapanese Cuisine
Book:The Kamogawa Food Detectives
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