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

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.

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.

Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.

In essence, the science of agronomy is inseparable from biology.

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

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.

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

When I went to university, I decided that I would like to do something related to plant ecology, because I felt that plants were so beautiful. When I am studying plants, I feel like I am talking with some kind of supernatural life, like I am talking with someone who does not speak.

A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.

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.

A theoretical grounding in agronomy must, therefore, include knowledge of biological laws.

And the more profoundly the science of biology reveals the laws of the life and development of living bodies, the more effective is the science of agronomy.

So I set out to study the oxidation system in the potato, which, if damaged, causes the plant to turn brown. I did this in the hope of discovering, through these studies, the key to the understanding of adrenal function.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

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

I have always been fascinated by plants. I have always preferred plants to human beings. They give me an enormous amount of solace.

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 am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.

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

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

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

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.

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.