Plant Identification Quotes

My mother was a midwife and a herbalist, so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.

If you can survive in the desert, you survive anywhere. I know more than anything life in desert. You can tell by looking at the dirt how long ago it rained, how hard it rained, how much water came through. You can by looking at a plant, a tree, from an animal's look. I can read the desert like I read my hand.

One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.

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.

Hence, a traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.

I'm in the woods so much I can tell you which plants are edible.

I hardly have any spare time! But when I do, I garden a lot - I love plants and flowers.

Botany is based on fixed genera.

Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist.

I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden... name things as I find them.

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.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.

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.

It may be a weed instead of a fish that, after all my labour, I at last pull up.

Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.

Plants are tricky. Many are edible, but one false mouthful and your dead

He gathers nuts among the rushes.

I know my corn plants intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.

I know dock leaves pretty well, but I should not attempt to introduce them into a picture without having them before me.

Gary Cooper was a good friend. He was a great nature lover. He was like an American Indian, he knew every leaf that was turned over. It was an education to go for a walk with him.

I must confess that I'm not a great reader. At the moment I'm reading my son's 'Stig of the Dump' by Clive King and I've got a plant catalogue on the go.

I didn't know the names of the flowers - now my garden is gone.