Michael Pollan Quotes

I don't think that you can possibly embrace the kind of joy which one who has worked with plants and plant structures such as I have over a period of nearly 40 years, how wonderful the plant laboratory seems.

I learnt about plants from my father, who was a herbalist and an amateur microscopist.

What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.

What would surprise a lot of people about me... I'm a gardener! I have a green thumb. I really like to get into the shrubs, the bushes, and really cultivate.

I've always had an affinity for growing things.

I'm a flower gardener.

I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.

I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.

Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

I do not yet know why plants come out of the land or float in streams, or creep on rocks or roll from the sea. I am entranced by the mystery of them, and absorbed by their variety and kinds. Everywhere they are visible yet everywhere occult.

A practical botanist will distinguish at the first glance the plant of the different quarters of the globe and yet will be at a loss to tell by what marks he detects them.

I also like to garden. I grow things, vegetables, flowers... I particularly like orchids. I raise orchids.

This was the first day of our beginning to take up plants: we had much pleasure in collecting them for the natives offered their assistance and perfectly understood the method of taking them up and pruning them.

The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.

Plants are not like us, and the more you study plants, the more different and deep ways you see that they are not like us.

I have a deep and pathological obsession with trees and plants.

A plant is like a self-willed man, out of whom we can obtain all which we desire, if we will only treat him his own way.

Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

Botany, n. The science of vegetables - those that are not good to eat, as well as those that are. It deals largely with their flowers, which are commonly badly designed, inartistic in color, and ill-smelling.

Plants, again, inasmuch as they are without locomotion, present no great variety in their heterogeneous pacts. For, when the functions are but few, few also are the organs required to effect them. ... Animals, however, that not only live but perceive, present a great multiformity of pacts, and this diversity is greater in some animals than in others, being most varied in those to whose share has fallen not mere life but life of high degree. Now such an animal is man.

It's my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they've got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very minor role.

Because I am really interested in gardening, I do really interesting plants, not even always flowers. And because I have grown them, I really know them like friends. I paint everything from exotic orchids to rosehips growing wild in a hedge. They just have to speak to me.

I like the physical activity of gardening. It's kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding.