Plant Reproduction Quotes

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

That one plant should be sown and another be produced cannot happen; whatever seed is sown, a plant of that kind even comes forth.

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.

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.

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.

Cloning isn’t all that unusual. For thousands of years we have been cloning plants.

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

From plants that wake when others sleep, from timid jasmine buds that keep their odour to themselves all day, but when the sunlight dies away let the delicious secret out to every breeze that roams about.

From the egg to the apple.

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.

In any case, if I grow hybrid maize or hybrid pearl mallet or any hybrid, I have to sow fresh seed every year. I cannot keep the seed of the same plant. If I keep the seed of the same plant, yield will be much less and there will be a wide variation in the field, like maturity period, quality and so on.

Everyone thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

We're not the only mammals who are partial to blackberries, far from it. Foxes and badgers will also gobble them up, helping to distribute the seeds, which survive the transit through the gut.

Let us investigate more closely this property common to animal and plant, this power of producing its likeness, this chain of successive existences of individuals, which constitutes the real existence of the species.

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

Whatever kind of seed is sown in a field, prepared in due season, a plant of that same kind, marked with the peculiar qualities of the seed, springs up in it.

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.

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.

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.

There are cases in which the blade springs, but the plant does not go on to flower. There are cases where it flowers, but no fruit is subsequently produced.

If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.

Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.