Quotes & Sayings About Botanists

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. — Henry David Thoreau

I've often thought that if planners were botanists, zoologists, geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers. — William O. Douglas

Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others' homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but "naturalized." This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters. — Kazimir Malevich

Nobody knows the ages of any of the living giant coast redwoods, because nobody has ever drilled into one of them in order to count its annual growth rings. Drilling into an old redwood would not reveal its age, anyway, because the oldest redwoods seem to be hollow; they don't have growth rings left in their centers to be counted. Botanists suspect that the oldest living redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old-they seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon. — Richard Preston

Fragments of the natural method must be sought with the greatest care. This is the first and last desideratum among botanists.
Nature makes no jumps.
[Natura non facit saltus]
All taxa show relationships on all sides like the countries on a map of the world. — Carl Linnaeus

In drying plants, botanists often dry themselves. Dry words and dry facts will not fire hearts. — John Muir

Hephaestus told Phyllis that she owed her name to the lovely girl whom Acamas left behind in Thrace after the Trojan War, promising to return.The poor girl waited in vain & out of desparation, hanged herself.The Goddess Nemesis took pity on the girl & turned her into a leafless almond tree.When Acamas at last returned,he was overcome with grief & embraced the tree which immediately sprouted green leaves, which gave the Greeks their word "phylla" meaning "green leaves" & all the botanists of the world their "phylla" words.Hephaestus also said that Vicky stood for Victory[Nike].[MMT] — Nicholas Chong

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

Congo has vast stands of biologically important forests as well as remote areas still waiting to be explored, yet we have very few botanists. I'm working to expand training for young students and inspire a new generation to make discoveries, spread the word about conservation, and increase protected areas throughout our country. — Corneille Ewango

Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never 'been a greater botanist or zoologist', and that his system of classification was 'the greatest achievement in the realm of science'. Modestly, he suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps Botanicorum, 'Prince of Botanists'. It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them. — Bill Bryson

If these d'Herelle bodies were really genes, fundamentally like our chromosome genes, they would give us an utterly new angle from which to attack the gene problem. They are filterable, to some extent isolable, can be handled in test-tubes, and their properties, as shown by their effects on the bacteria, can then be studied after treatment. It would be very rash to call these bodies genes, and yet at present we must confess that there is no distinction known between the genes and them. Hence we can not categorically deny that perhaps we may be able to grind genes in a mortar and cook them in a beaker after all. Must we geneticists become bacteriologists, physiological chemists and physicists, simultaneously with being zoologists and botanists? Let us hope so. — Hermann Joseph Muller

She heard her father's voice as she prepared, remembering all the times she had taken dictation for him, or had overheard him instructing young botanists. 'Be wakeful and watchful,' she heard Henry say. 'Make sure you are not the only member of your party who can write or read a letter. If you need need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat. Your biggest dangers are not snakes, lions, or cannibals; your biggest dangers are blistered feet, carelessness, and fatigue. Be certain to write your diaries and maps legibly; if you die, your notes may be of use to a future explorer. In an emergency, you can always write in blood. — Elizabeth Gilbert

All the species recognized by Botanists came forth from the Almighty Creator's hand, and the number of these is now and always will be exactly the same, while every day new and different florists' species arise from the true species so-called by Botanists, and when they have arisen they finally revert to the original forms. Accordingly to the former have been assigned by Nature fixed limits, beyond which they cannot go: while the latter display without end the infinite sport of Nature. — Carl Linnaeus

Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants. — Richard Preston

I think it would be worth the while to introduce a school of children to such [an oak grove], that they may get an idea of the primitive oaks before they are all gone, instead of hiring botanists to lecture to them when it is too late. — Henry David Thoreau

The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's story but, insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom. — Willa Cather

Mr. Gweta and his daughter were the cosmetics camouflaging an infected blackhead. The rest of the ugliness ran deep into a world where plants ate people and botanists lay at the bottom of the food chain. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

Botanists call it an invasive species. But aren't we all? — Teju Cole

Don't worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design. You don't have to be a botanist; you don't have to be a bulldozer driver; you don't have to be a fence builder; you don't have to be an architect. What the designer has to do is look at the relationships. — Bill Mollison

Men of Science would do well to talk plain English. The most abstruse questions can very well be discussed in our own tongue ... I make a particular appeal to the botanists, who appear to delight in troublesome words. — Oliver Lodge

What we do see depends mainly on what we look for ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them. — John Lubbock

They do not know very good Latin, these botanists. — Albert Hofmann

Only recently, the word scientist had been coined, by the polymath William Whewell. Many scholars had objected to this blunt new term, as it sounded so sinisterly similar to that awful word atheist; why not simply continue to call themselves natural philosophers? Was that designation not more godly, more pure? But divisions were being drawn now between the realm of nature and the realm of philosophy. Ministers who doubled as botanists or geologists were becoming increasingly rare, as far too many challenges to biblical truths were stirred up through investigation of the natural world. It used to be that God was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other. As — Elizabeth Gilbert