Michael Pollan Quotes

We are told that the first part of the process is to select the very smallest seeds from the smallest plants, which is not at all unlikely, but I cannot speak to the fact from my own observation.

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

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.

That one plant should be sown and another be produced cannot happen; whatever seed is sown, a plant of that kind even comes forth.

What's not to aspire to about how to grow your own fruit and vegetables and plants, and then being creative?

Plant breeding has been going on for millennia and it's a gradual process.

In any case, if I grow hybrid maize or hybrid pearl mallet or any hybrid, I have to sow fresh seed every year. I cannot keep the seed of the same plant. If I keep the seed of the same plant, yield will be much less and there will be a wide variation in the field, like maturity period, quality and so on.

I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.

Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle.

In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.

The plants which stand next to dwarf trees in importance with the Chinese are certainly chrysanthemums, which they manage extremely well, perhaps better than they do any other plant.

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 think I just want to garden - or kill some plants, in my case.

Yesterday I staked off the ground on the hill for an orchard. I want to get 1,000 apple trees agrowing.

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.

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

I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me

When all is said and done, is there any more wonderful sight, any moment when man's reason is nearer to some sort of contact with the nature of the world than the sowing of seeds, the planting of cuttings, the transplanting of shrubs or the grafting of slips?

I've always been interested in plants because I'm a gardener, so I have a basic understanding of botany and things like that, but it's all self-taught.

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

I planted an orchard when I was 13. The impulse came from wanting to grow my own apples. That and the nursery catalog showed an apple tree with a beautiful girl standing under the fruit. Whether the flavor or the picture that did it, I've been hooked since.

I'm huge on spring and summer gardening. I'm really proud of my perennial beds. That's a passion of mine.

My early business ventures included growing Christmas trees and breeding birds.

I am a gardener, I have a big green thumb, and I can take care of these plants really easily because they are all fake.