Soil Composition Quotes

The wood of any tree growing anywhere records fairly faithfully the oxygen and hydrogen chemistry of the water the plant has access to through precipitation.

The soil is not a mass of dead debris, merely resulting from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks; it is a more or less homogeneous system which has resulted from the decomposition of plant and animal remains. It is teeming with life.

The most savory grape, the one that produces the wines with best texture and aroma, the sweetest and most generous, doesn't grow in rich soil but in stony land; the plant, with a mother's obstinacy, overcomes obstacles to thrust its roots deep into the ground and take advantage of every drop of water. That, my grandmother explained to me, is how flavors are concentrated in the grape.

All soils are not fertile.

England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

When a wall is slowly covered over by earth, the materials it's made from decay and become part of the soils around and above it, sometimes causing vegetation above and next to the wall to grow faster or slower. Satellite imagery helps archaeologists to pick up these subtle changes.

Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds.

Consider what each soil will bear, and what each refuses.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material.

There's a lot of knowledge in civil engineering about how soils will react when subjected to heavy loads. When you take lightweight vehicles and granular soils of varying composition, it's a very complex modeling process.

That dark laboratory we call the soil.

The only technology that can 'see' beneath the ground is radar imagery. But satellite imagery also allows scientists to map short- and long-term changes to the Earth's surface. Buried archaeological remains affect the overlying vegetation, soils and even water in different ways, depending on the landscapes you're examining.

I think the water dictates how food will taste in a country. In England the apples taste unlike apples grown in any other place. England is an island, there's a lot of salt in the air and in the water. I think that has something to do with it.

As far as plants are concerned, they can't tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter.

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.

How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.