Liberty Hyde Bailey Quotes

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

What is a berry? It is an ovary swaddled within a sugary womb. Plainly put, a berry is the fruition of a flower - the ultimate tautology.

Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.

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.

While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.

Plants are decisive to a fault. A stem produces a bud that flowers once and once only. It offers pollen that is either dispersed or goes nowhere. One pollen grain either enters a stigma or it falls upon stony ground. An ovum is either fertilized or the whole project stalls out.

Essentially, all life on the planet is coming from the earth. Whether it is a human being or an earthworm, it is the same soil.

...Nature-the word that stands for the baffling mysteries of the Universe. Steadily, unflinchingly, we strive to pierce the inmost heart of Nature, from what she is to reconstruct what she has been, and to prophesy what she yet shall be. Veil after veil we have lifted, and her face grows more beautiful, august, and wonderful, with every barrier that is withdrawn.

The sun gives spirit and life to the plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture.

Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to another in order for stars to shine, planets to rotate, plants to grow, and civilizations to evolve.

If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance.