Percy Julian Quotes

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.

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

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

Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

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.

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

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.