{"quotes":[{"text":"Every plant is an individual.Wrong again. We are not individuals at all, we are all connected. We are individuals the way each blossom on an apple tree is an individual.","author":"Dale Pendell","tags":["botany","connectivity","existential","individuality","plants"],"id":14398,"author_id":"Dale+Pendell"},{"text":"The underlying melody via every rock, plant, animal, sky and star, inside the water, from the dirt, through the light: only love lasts.","author":"Melina Sempill Watts","tags":["botany","hope","love","magical-realism","universe"],"id":82456,"author_id":"Melina+Sempill+Watts"},{"text":"The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.","author":"Michael Pollan","tags":["beauty","biology","botany"],"id":107642,"author_id":"Michael+Pollan"},{"text":"The GeraniumWhen I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,She looked so limp and bedraggled,So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,Or a wizened aster in late September,I brought her back in againFor a new routine -Vitamins, water, and whateverSustenance seemed sensibleAt the time: she'd livedSo long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,Her shriveled petals fallingOn the faded carpet, the staleSteak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)The things she endured!-The dumb dames shrieking half the nightOr the two of us, alone, both seedy,Me breathing booze at her,She leaning out of her pot toward the window.Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me-And that was scary-So when that snuffling cretin of a maidThrew her, pot and all, into the trash-can,I said nothing.But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,I was that lonely.","author":"Theodore Roethke","tags":["alcoholism","anthropomorphization","botany","flowers","loneliness","sentimental"],"id":108900,"author_id":"Theodore+Roethke"},{"text":"I wanted a Fakahatchee ghost orchid, in full bloom, maybe attached to a gnarled piece of custard apple tree, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root to be only as wide as a toothpick. I wanted the bloom to be snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth. I knew its shape by heart, the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals, the albino toad with its springy legs. It would not be the biggest or the showiest or the rarest or the finest flower here, except to me, because I wanted it.","author":"Susan Orlean","tags":["botany","desire"],"id":157051,"author_id":"Susan+Orlean"},{"text":"The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany, and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know, that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace.","author":"Robert G. Ingersoll","tags":["astronomy","botany","disagreement","father","hate","knowledge","math","mathematics","mother","peace","persecute","science","sectarian","sword"],"id":168074,"author_id":"Robert+G.+Ingersoll"},{"text":"To Tree’s surprise, e could still feel the blade of Univervia that was on the deer’s tongue. And the feelings that came at Tree were fast, intense and surprising. The whole blade lay languid, surrendering as the tongue mashed the strands of grass up to the roof of the doe’s mouth. Then the deer twisted the grass sideways and ground teeth into the grass. As the grass was destroyed, each cell popped and gave shots of grass life-force into the hungry deer, in little pops of ecstatic release. The whole thing happened as swiftly as a string of firecrackers going off into light and smoke, leaving behind a dull residue that gave no sense of the evanescent beauty that had been enchanting the air only moments before. Tree felt this chunk of Univervia embrace willful dissolution and then suddenly all these little pieces that had been integrated into Univervia were separated into something like ananda, the joy which powers the universe and then... Then the grass was deer.","author":"Melina Sempill Watts","tags":["botany","eating","food","light","nature","trees"],"id":173348,"author_id":"Melina+Sempill+Watts"},{"text":"The color and shape of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive.","author":"Frederick Turner","tags":["beauty","botany"],"id":198462,"author_id":"Frederick+Turner"},{"text":"Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.","author":"John Ruskin","tags":["botany","forces","god","humanity","science","theology"],"id":297353,"author_id":"John+Ruskin"},{"text":"I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves.[Letter to W.H. Harvey].","author":"Joseph Dalton Hooker","tags":["biology","botany","charles-darwin","darwin","evolution","plants","science","study","w-h-harvey","william-harvey","william-henry-harvey"],"id":321397,"author_id":"Joseph+Dalton+Hooker"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}