Quotations on Plants

Then God said, "Let the land burst forth with every sort of grass and seed-bearing plant. And let there be trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. The seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came." And so it was. The land was filled with seed-bearing plants and trees, and their seeds produced plants and trees of like kind. And God saw that it was good.

-Genesis 1:11-12 from the New Living Translation of the Bible  

God Almighty first planted a garden.

-Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) from "Of Gardens"  

In this light, my spirit saw through all things
and into all creatures,
and I recognized God in grass and plants.

-Jacob Boehme (1575-1624)  

A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food—in sum, a plant. The green substance of this earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood.

-Hal Borland (1900-1978), Our Natural World, 1969 *  

May God give you of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine.

-the Patriarch Issac's Blessing from Genesis 27:28
from the New Revised Standard Bible  

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

-Helen Keller (1880-1968)  

Each opening bud, and care-perfected seed,
Is as a page, where we may read of God.

-Almira Lincoln Phelps (1793-1884), "The Wonders of Nature," Poems  

I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!

-Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Renascence  

Every flower of the field, every fiber of a plant, every particle of an insect carries with it the impress of its Maker and can—if duly considered—read us lectures of ethics or divinity.

-Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649-1697)  

Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, "Grow -- grow!"

-The Talmud  

God Bless the grass
That grows through the crack
They roll the concrete over it
To try and keep it back
The concrete gets tired
Of what it has to do
It breaks and it buckles
And the grass grows through.
God bless the grass

-Malvina Reynolds (1900-1978) from song God Bless the Grass  

I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied.

-Deuteronomy 11:15 from the New International Version of the Bible  

A plant is like a self-willed man, out of whom we can obtain all which we desire, if we will only treat him his own way.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)  

Grass is the forgiveness of nature - her constant benediction. Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.

-Brian Ingalls  

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

-Hal Borland (1900-1978)  

Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere;
My humble song of praise
Most joyfully I raise To Him at whose command
I beautify the land,
Creeping, silently creeping everywhere.

-Sarah Roberts Boyle, from The Voice of the Grass
in An American Anthology, 1787–1900, ed. E.C. Stedman  

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge....It’s obvious that we don't know one millionth of one percent about anything.

-Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)  

Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!

-Jesus quoted in Luke 12:27-28
from the New International Version of the Bible  

For the flowers are great blessings.
For the Lord made a Nosegay in the meadow with his disciples and preached upon the lily.
For the flowers have great virtues for all senses.
For the flower glorifies God and the root parries the adversary.
For the flowers have their angels even the words of God's creation.
For there is a language of flowers.
For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers.
For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.

-Christopher Smart (1722-1771), Jubilate Agno  

The Earth laughs in flowers.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)  

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.

-Beverley Nichols  

Stars of earth, these golden flowers; emblems of our own great resurrection; emblems of the bright and better land.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)  

We have much to hope from the flowers.

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)  

Green, the color of growth, or surgent life, enwraps the land. New green, still as individual as the plants themselves. Cool green, which will merge as the weeks pass, the Summer comes, into a canopy of shade of busy chlorophyll.

-Hal Borland (1900-1978), Sundial of the Seasons, 1964  

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

-Edward Abbey (1927-1989)  

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892)  

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

-Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) from Grass in Modern American Poetry, 1919  

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

-James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)  

Of all the everyday plants of the earth, grass is the least pretentious and the most important to mankind. It clothes the earth is an unmistakable way. Directly or indirectly it provides the bulk of man's food, his meat, his bread, every scrap of his cereal diet. Without grass we would all starve, we and all our animals. And what a dismal place this world would be!

-Hal Borland (1900-1978), Sundial of the Seasons, 1964  

I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892), from Leaves of Grass, 1900  

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Fortune of the Republic 1878  

I am the mown grass, dying at your feet,
The pale grass, gasping faintly in the sun.
I shall be dead, long, long ere day is done,
That you may say: "The air, to-day, was sweet."
I am the mown grass, dying at your feet.

-Margaret Gilman (George) Davidson, from Moritura
in An American Anthology, 1787–1900, ed. E.C. Stedman  

He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate-- bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart.

-Psalm 104:14-15 from the New International Version of the Bible  

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892) from Song of Myself  

There the great Planter plants
    Of fruitful worlds the grain,
And with a million spells enchants
    The souls that walk in pain.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Waldeinsamkeit"  

The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth.

-Frances Moore Lappé, Diet For A Small Planet, 1971  

The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.

-Jesus quoted in Mark 4:28 from the New Revised Standard Bible  

Year by year, the energy cost of each mouthful of our food has increased, until now we are using about ten times as much energy as our meals contain. This is hard to believe, but it begins with agriculture itself. The tractors need gasoline, the irrigation pumps need electricity, synthetic fertilizers need natural gas. There are some crops like low-intensity potatoes that yield ten times as much energy as they use up, but others, like feedlot beef, use more than ten times as much energy as they produce. It all averages out to figures that agriculture consumes about three times the amount of energy eventually consumed at the table. But the energy costs don't end with growing the food. Harvesting is followed by trucking and food processing. The manufacture of paper, glass jars, and metal cans used for packaging all require additional energy. The costs just keep adding up right through cooking the meal itself. The final tally is roughly ten calories spent for every calorie we swallow. The U.S. food system hasn't been at a break-even point since about 1910, and it seems destined to get worse.

-Roger B. Swain, Earthly Pleasures, 1978  

The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?

-Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, 1989  

Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;
Let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall;
Who sows a field, or trains a flower,
Or plants a tree, is more than all.

                 -John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), A Song of Harvest 

Let grain abound throughout the land; on the tops of the hills may it sway. Let its fruit flourish like Lebanon; let it thrive like the grass of the field.

-Psalm 72:16 from the New International Version of the Bible  

The shrinkage in the flora is due to a combination of clean-farming, woodlot grazing, and good roads. Each of these necessary changes of course requires a larger reduction in the acreage available for wild plants, but none of them requires, or benefits by, the erasure of species from whole farms, townships, or counties. There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), A Sand County Almanac, 1948

The main characteristic of Nature's farming can therefore be summed up in a few words. Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.

-Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947), An Agricultural Testament, 1940  

You have increasing poverty and increasing wealth. Fine food is one way to dispense with a lot of money...It's understanding that our daily choices about food connect us to a worldwide economic system. And that economic system -- not scarcity -- creates worldwide hunger for millions of people.

-Frances Moore Lappé quoted in "Image"
San Francisco Daily Examiner Chronicle, 1987  

These varieties have 50 percent higher yields, mature 30 to 50 days earlier, are substantially richer in protein; are far more disease and drought tolerant, resist insect pests and can even out-compete weeds. And they will be especially useful because they can be grown without fertilizer or herbicides, which many poor farmers can't afford anyway. This initiative shows the enormous potential of biotech to improve food security in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

-Mark Malloch Brown, United Nations Development Program administrator,
quoted in "Report Cites Benefits of Biotechnology for Developing Countries,"
Environment News Service, 11 July 2001  

There are methods that are much more environmentally sound, socially and culturally acceptable, that can raise yields and at the same time conserve the natural resource base, increase income and also empower farmers…We have created pest problems with pesticides, now we're going to create even more pest problems with transgenic crops…You can delay it, but it's going to happen.

-Dr. Miguel Altieri of the University of California – Berkeley,
quoted in "Report Cites Benefits of Biotechnology for Developing Countries,"
Environment News Service, 11 July 2001  

The industrialized world depends entirely on crops and cultivation practices imported from what we now call the Third World (though evidently it was actually First). In an important departure from older traditions, the crops we now grow in the United States are extremely uniform genetically, due to the fact that our agriculture is controlled primarily by a few large agricultural corporations that sell relatively few varieties of seeds. Those who know the seed business are well aware that our shallow seed bank is highly vulnerable; when a crop strain succumbs all at once to a new disease, all across the country (as happened with our corn in 1970), researchers must return to the more diverse original strains for help. So we still rely on the gigantic insurance policy provided by the genetic variability in the land races, which continue to be hand-sown and harvested, year in and year out, by farmers in those mostly poor places from which our crop arose. Unbelievably, we are now engaged in a serious effort to cancel this insurance policy.

-Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002

Do not plant two kinds of seed in your vineyard; if you do, not only the crops you plant but also the fruit of the vineyard will be defiled.

-Deuteronomy 22:9 from the New International Version of the Bible  

In a total economy, all materials, creatures, and ideas become commodities, interchangeable and disposable. People become commodities along with everything else. Only such an economy could seek to impose upon the world's abounding geographic and creaturely diversity the tyranny of technological and genetic monoculture. Only in such an economy could "life forms" be patented, or the renewability of nature and culture be destroyed. Monsanto's aptly named "terminator gene"—which, implanted in seed sold by Monsanto, would cause the next generation to be sterile—is as grave an indicator of totalitarian purpose as a concentration camp.

-Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle, 2000  

A patent on seeds is a patent on freedom. If you have to pay for patented seeds, it's like being forced to buy your own freedom.

-Ka Memong Patayan, Filipino octogenarian activist
quoted in Adbusters Jul/Aug 2001  

The quest to commercialize plant genes by transnational companies and national governments is destroying a wealth of genetic resources and livelihoods across the Asia-Pacific region, says a report released Tuesday. “Plants are vanishing so quickly that...one major drug [becomes] extinct every two years,” said the coauthors of the report, Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN), a Barcelona based campaigns group, and Kalpvriksha, an Indian environmental organization. “Overall, communities are increasingly losing control over their own plants and are being increasingly exploited for their knowledge,” the authors claim.

-Kalyani, “Scramble for Green Gold Kills Asian Biodiversity,” 
Environment News Service, 2 Oct 02

Seed banks, even if they’re eleven thousand years old, can’t survive for more than a few years on the shelf. If they aren’t grown out as crops year after year, they die—or else get ground into flour and baked and eaten—and then this product of a thousand hands and careful selection is just gone, once and for all… While agricultural companies have purchased, stored, and patented certain genetic materials from old crops, they cannot engineer a crop, ever, that will have the resilience of land races under a wide variety of conditions of moisture, predation, and temperature. Genetic engineering is the antithesis of variability because it removes the wild card—that beautiful thing called sex—from the equation.

-Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002

Science may at times have been altruistically applied. But even such nominally altruistic sciences as medicine and plant-breeding have now become so deeply interpenetrated with economics and politics that their motives are at best mixed with, and at worst replaced by, the motives of corporations and governments. If nothing else, the increasing costliness of the practice of conventional science, and its consequent dependence on large grants or investments, would mitigate against its purity. One can only assume that pure science now needs to move fast (and beg hard) to keep its skirts from being lifted by the ever randy and handy corporate giants.

-Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle, 2000  

You crown the year with your bounty. Your carts overflow with abundance.
The wilderness grasslands overflow. The hills are clothed with gladness.
The pastures are covered with flocks.
The valleys also are clothed with grain.
They shout for joy! They also sing.

-Psalm 65:11-13 from the World English translation of the Bible  

The unlimited capacity of the plant world to sustain man at his highest is a region as yet unexplored by modern science.

-Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948),
quoted in Anthony Huxley, Plants and Planet, 1975 *  

And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscure the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals—just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.

-Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating," What Are People For? 1990  

All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.

-Hal Borland (1900-1978), Sundial of the Seasons, 1964  

So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor.

-the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:7-8
from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible  

Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops. I called for a drought on the fields and mountains, on the grain, the new wine, the oil and whatever the ground produces, on men and on cattle, and on the labor of your hands.

-the prophet Haggai (c.520 B.C.)
from Haggai 1:10-11 the New International Version of the Bible  

They tell us that plants are not like man immortal, but are perishable—soul-less. I think that is something that we know exactly nothing about.

-John Muir (1838-1914), Journal, Autumn 1867 *  

Two years ago, I was saying as I planted seeds in the garden, "I must believe in these seeds, that they fall into the earth and grow into flowers and radishes and beans." It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it. The very fact that they use glib technical phrases does not make it any less a miracle, and a miracle we all accept. Then why not accept God's miracles?

-Dorothy Day (1897-1980), From Union Square to Rome, 1938  

The kiss of the sun for pardon
The song of the birds for mirth
You are nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

-Dorothy Frances Gurney (1858-1932), "God's Garden"  

And out of the smoke locusts came down upon the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads.

-Apostle John in Revelations 9:3-4
from the New International Version of the Bible

© 2008 University of St. Thomas, Minnesota USA
All rights reserved.