Botanical Research Quotes

During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew.

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.

Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.

I decided that my means were sufficient to enable me to devote myself to botany, a determination which I never, during the long period of my subsequent career, had on any occasion any reason to repent of.

A herbarium is better than any illustration; every botanist should make one.

For my part, I would say that the male sperm and seeds of plants have been penetrated so far that there is nothing further to discover in this great secret, but I could err in my opinion.

It's rare - too rare, I have to say - for botanists to become doctors.

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.

It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.

Congo has vast stands of biologically important forests as well as remote areas still waiting to be explored, yet we have very few botanists. I'm working to expand training for young students and inspire a new generation to make discoveries, spread the word about conservation, and increase protected areas throughout our country.

Possession of the pure synthetic specimens of the anthocyanidins and chief anthocyanins enabled my wife and me to devise quick tests for these colouring matters which can be used with the material from a few flower petals.