Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.
You do not explain the tree by telling of the water it has drunk, the minerals it has absorbed, and the sunlight that strengthened it.
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.
The main part of the tree is the root, and the root is always beneath the ground. It never is brought out into the light.
I have learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus. On a cactus, the pricks are on the outside.
Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.
How do the stems connect to the roots?' 'Where is the mist coming from?' 'Why does one tree seem darker than another?' These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
Vegetables are organized bodies that grow on the dry areas of the globe and within its waters. Their function is to combine immediately the four elements and to serve as food for animals.
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.
A root is a flower that disdains fame.
For an Apple is in it self a little Universe; the Seed, hotter than the other parts thereof, is its Sun, which diffuses about it self that natural Heat which preserves its Globe: And in the Onion, the Germ is the little Sun of that little World, which vivifies and nourishes the vegetative Salt of that little mass.
We must consider the distinctive characters and the general nature of plants from the point of view of their morphology, their behavior under external conditions, their mode of generation, and the whole course of their life.
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.
Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower-but if I could understand What you are, root and all, all in all, I should know what God and man is.
A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.
We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
I learnt about plants from my father, who was a herbalist and an amateur microscopist.
