Plants

Botany is the art of plants. Plants are divided into trees, flowers and vegetables. The true botanist knows a tree as soon as he sees it. He learns to distinguish it from a vegetable by merely putting his ear to it.
— Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Literary Lapses (1910).

The male mandrake hath great broad long smooth leaves of a darke green colour, flat spread upon the ground: among which come up the flowers of a pale whitish colour, standing every one upon a small and weake foot-stalk of a whitish green colour: in their places grow round apples of a yellowish colour, smooth, soft, and glittering, of a strong smell; in which are contained flat and smooth seeds in the fashion of a little kidney, like those of the thorn-apple. The root is long, thick, whitish, divided many times into two or three parts resembling the legs of a man, with other parts of his body adjoining thereto, as the privy part, as it hath been reported; whereas in truth it is no otherwise than in the roots of carrots, parsnips and such like, forked or divided into two or more parts, which Nature taketh no account of. There hath been many ridiculous tales brought up of this plant, whether of old wives, or some runnagate surgeons or physick-mongers I know not, (a title bad enough for them) but sure some one or more that sought to make themselves famous and skilful above others, were the first broachers of that error I speak of. They add further, that it is never or very seldom to be found growing naturally but under a gallows, where the matter that hath fallen from the dead body hath given it the shape of a man; and the matter of a woman, the substance of a female plant, with many other such doltish dreams. They fable further and affirm, that he who would take up a plant thereof must tie a dog thereunto to pull it up, which will give a great shriek at the digging-up; otherwise if a man should do it, he would surely die in a short space after.
— John Gerard (1545 – 1612).

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
— Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress.

I learned by experiment, that everything vegetable is derived directly and materially from the element of water. I took a vessel of earthenware and put into it, 200 lot of dried earth. I watered this with rain water and planted into it a young willow, which had a weight of 16 lot. Five years later the same plant had a weight of 169 lot and some ounces … I dried the earth in the vessel and determined its weight at the end of the experiment as 200 lot minus two ounces. The total weight difference between the old and the young plant was thus clearly derived from the water…
— Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577 – 1644).

… no human engineer can convert the sun’s energy into living food as every green plant does day by day.
— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937.

I was endeavouring by several ways to stop the bleeding of an old stem of a Vine, which was cut too near the bleeding season, which I feared might kill it. Having, after other means proved ineffectual, tied a piece of bladder over the transverse cut of the Stem I found the force of the Sap did greatly extend the bladder; whence I concluded, that if a long glass tube were fixed there in the same manner as I had before done to the Arteries of several living Animals I should thereby obtain the real ascending force of the Sap in the Stem, which succeeded according to my expectation: and hence it is that I have been insensibly led on to make farther and farther researches by variety of Experiments.
— Stephen Hales (1677 – 1761), Vegetable Staticks, preface.

At last we caught sight of the immense tree, which is nevertheless not the tallest nor the thickest of its species. It is 137 metres high, and 11 metres in circumference. It reminded us of the highest eucalypt so far discovered — 145 metres tall, it would make a shade for the Strasbourg Cathedral!
— Oscar Comettant, In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines, translated by Judith Armstrong. Adelaide: Rigby, 1980, originally published as Au Pays des Kangourous et des Mines d’or. Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1890, pages 89-90.

The leaves are mostly of a dull green, with a dry sapless look about them, more like old specimens in a herbarium than fresh living and growing things, and, being thinly scattered on the branches, have a meagre appearance. They are, however, ‘evergreens’, and in their peculiarity of habit strongly remind the observer that he is at the antipodes of England, or very near it, where everything seems topsy-turvy, for instead of the ‘fall of the leaf’, here we have the stripping of the bark, which peels off at certain seasons in long pendent ragged ribands, leaving the disrobed tree almost as white and smooth as the paper I am now writing on. At first I did not like this at all, but now the clean stems of a young handsome gum-tree seem a pleasing variety amidst the sombre hues of an Australian forest.
— Louise Ann (Mrs Charles) Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. London: John Murray, 1844, and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973, 40.

From the geographical position of Australia, no less than from the altitude of its southern mountains, it is well placed for the maintenance of those types of vegetation which I have denominated Antarctic. These, it must be remembered, are so called not because they really inhabit the country of that name beyond the Polar circle, but because in a botanical point of view, no less than in the position relative to the south temperate Flora, they represent the Arctic flora. They might indeed almost be called alpine plants, for many which are found at the level of the sea in the so-called Antarctic islands, also ascend the mountains at more genial latitudes.
— Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817 – 1911), quoted in W. B. Turrill, Joseph Dalton Hooker, 41 (from Flora Tasmaniae?)

Consequently we, at home in England, are inclined to believe that Australia, as a country, is displeasing to the eye. The eternal gum-tree has become to us an Australian crest, giving evidence of Australian ugliness. The gum-tree is ubiquitous, and is not the loveliest, though neither is it by any means the ugliest, of trees.
— Trollope, Anthony, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), 227.

On the way down we passed through a country now well known for its enormous trees, – all gum-trees of various sorts, or Eucalypti as they are called by the learned. At the land office in Melbourne, I heard tidings of one enormous tree which had lately been discovered in this region, prostrate over a river-bed, and of which the remaining portion, – for the head had been broken off in the fall, – measured 435 ft. in length.
— Trollope, Anthony, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), 422.

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892), The Brook.

That they ever thrived in the tropics, before the flowering trees, is difficult to believe, yet there are tropical conifers, much less familiarly known as Podocarpus, Dacrydium, Agathis and Araucaria, trees which are scattered in the broad-leafed tropical forest. They extend into the south temperate regions, as the kauri pine (Agathis) of New Zealand, and the monkey puzzle and parana pine (Araucaria) of South America.
— E. J. H. Corner, The Life of Plants, 1964, 117.

When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.
— William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.
— Proverb, dating back to the 16th century.

Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley.
— Holy Bible, Job, 31:40.

The possibility of using gibberellins as stimulants for the growth of crop plants is obviously an attractive one, but it must be realised that they only affect the form of growth and do not directly increase the total yield of plant material. A cabbage 10 feet high with leaves at 6-inch intervals has entertainment value of a sort, but does not have any more leaves or weigh much more than a normal cabbage, and is of distinctly less value as food.
— G. E. Fogg, The Growth of Plants, Pelican, 1963, 163.

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