Cactus Plant Quotes

Flailing and thrashing, Buttercup wept and tossed and paced and wept some more, and there have been three great cases of jealousy since David of Galilee was first afflicted with the emotion when he could no longer stand the fact that his neighbor Saul's cactus outshone his own. (Originally, jealousy pertained solely to plants, other people's cactus or ginkgoes, or, later, when there was grass, grass, which is why, even to this day, we say that someone is green with jealousy.) Buttercup's case rated a close fourth on the all-time list. It was a very long and very green night.

You are holding a cactus plant in your hand. You are bleeding and cursing the cactus but not letting go of it. Cactus is not hurting you. Your own attachment with the cactus is hurting you.

The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland. The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox. The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides. The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun. The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus. The moral of the story? Kids are smart.

He unlaced his arms and took a step forward. "You hurt?" "Not badly." She tried to smile, but her lips only curved on one side. "My main problem is that I'm stuck to a cactus." (...) "How'd you manage to get tangled up with a cactus?" J.T. crouched beside her and started extricating her from the prickly plant. "Well, believe it or not, I was on my way to apologize to you when a prairie-dog hole jumped up and grabbed my shoe heel.

This skin thing always pisses me off. What I need is a nopal on my forehead to let the world know about my roots. One of those flat cactus plants that my grandpa grew behind the house before he died--nopal en la frente. Yup. That would solve all my problems.

Felicity Montague, you are a cactus.” “Debatable.” My knees are aching against the hard floor, so I stretch out on my stomach parallel to her, propping my chin on my hands. “My botanical equivalent would more likely be . . . what are those plants that shrivel as soon as you touch them? I’d be one of those.

I guess we all wish we were tough little cactus plants: needing the occasional bit of water but on the whole completely independent, able to protect ourselves when need be. I wanted to be a cactus. I wanted nothing more than to grow spikes and root myself in the ground.

The subject of today’s lesson will be plants.” He sat down, pulled off his satchel, and emptied the contents onto the grass. Out spilled an assortment of plants and powders, the severed arm of a cactus, several bright red poppy flowers with pods still attached, and a handful of sun-dried mushrooms. “Are we getting high?” Rin said. “Oh, wow. We’re getting high, aren’t we?” “I’m getting high,” said Jiang. “You’re watching.

It was nice talking to her. Comfortable. Like an old pair of jeans— “But I still have to arrest you.” —that had been rolled in a cactus plant.

When he suggested we should live together I didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t even a real decision, it was more like buying a goldfish or a potted cactus plant, not because you want one in advance but because you happen to be in the store and you see them lined up on the counter. I’m fond of him, I’d rather have him around than not; though it would be nice if he meant something more to me.

for another compound with proven effect on hangover symptoms, extract of the skin of the prickly pear cactus, Opuntia ficus indica. Mexican restaurants sell the paddles of this plant as nopales,

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass, he walked through the woods one winter crunching through the shinycrusted snow stumbling into a little dell where a warm spring was and found the grass green and weeds sprouting and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb, He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural Selection that wasn't what they taught in church, so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg, found a seedball in a potato plant sowed the seed and cashed in on Darwin’s Natural Selection on Spencer and Huxley with the Burbank potato. Young man go west; Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa full of his dream of green grass in winter ever- blooming flowers ever- bearing berries; Luther Burbank could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Burbank carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in winter and seedless berries and stoneless plums and thornless roses brambles cactus— winters were bleak in that bleak brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts— out to sunny Santa Rosa; and he was a sunny old man where roses bloomed all year everblooming everbearing hybrids. America was hybrid America could cash in on Natural Selection. He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and Natural Selection and the influence of the mighty dead and a good firm shipper’s fruit suitable for canning. He was one of the grand old men until the churches and the congregations got wind that he was an infidel and believed in Darwin. Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil, selected improved hybrids for America those sunny years in Santa Rosa. But he brushed down a wasp’s nest that time; he wouldn’t give up Darwin and Natural Selection and they stung him and he died puzzled. They buried him under a cedartree. His favorite photograph was of a little tot standing beside a bed of hybrid everblooming double Shasta daisies with never a thought of evil And Mount Shasta in the background, used to be a volcano but they don’t have volcanos any more.

And now it is said of me That my love is nothing because I have borne no children, Or because I have fathered none; That I twisted the twig in my hands And cut the blossom free too soon from the seed; That I lay across the fire, And snuffed it dead sooner than draft or rain. But I have turned away, and drawn myself Upright to walk along the room alone. Across the dark the spines of cactus plants Remind me how I go—aloof, obscure, Indifferent to the words the children chalk Against my house and down the garden walls. They cannot tear the garden out of me, Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff, A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars, smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more, Till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again. I keep the house and say no words, the evening Falls like a petal down the shawl of trees. I light the fire and see the blossom dance On air alone; I will not douse that flame, That searing flower; I will burn in it. I will not banish love to empty rain. For I know that I am asked to hate myself For their sweet sake Who sow the world with child. I am given to burn on the dark fire they make With their sly voices. But I have burned already down to bone. There is a fire that burns beyond the names Of sludge and filth of which this world is made. Agony sears the dark flesh of the body, And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise Above the earth, above the sacrifice; Until my soul flares outward like a blue Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air: Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.

Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset, There must be one (which, I am not sure) That I by now have walked for the last time Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws, Sets up a secret and unwavering scale for all the shadows, dreams, and forms Woven into the texture of this life. If there is a limit to all things and a measure And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness, Who will tell us to whom in this house We without knowing it have said farewell? Through the dawning window night withdraws And among the stacked books which throw Irregular shadows on the dim table, There must be one which I will never read. There is in the South more than one worn gate, With its cement urns and planted cactus, Which is already forbidden to my entry, Inaccessible, as in a lithograph. There is a door you have closed forever And some mirror is expecting you in vain; To you the crossroads seem wide open, Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus. There is among all your memories one Which has now been lost beyond recall. You will not be seen going down to that fountain Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon. You will never recapture what the Persian Said in his language woven with birds and roses, When, in the sunset, before the light disperses, You wish to give words to unforgettable things. And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake, All that vast yesterday over which today I bend? They will be as lost as Carthage, Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt. At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent Murmur of crowds milling and fading away; They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by; Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

Plant a cactus dahlia and a marguerite bush side by side in rich mellow land for a season; they will both give noble return - generous wealth of blossom, splendid growth. Change the same plants another year into starved, sandy soil and what happens? The dahlia shows a warped altered nature at once - the plant grows awry, the flowers, if it flowers at all, come sickly and sullen-looking. Look at the marguerite; it is dismayed for a little time and then adapts itself cheerily to place; it makes a bush as large as ever, it flowers again with all its heart - not quite such fine flowers perhaps, but to make up it gives them in greater profusion.

So he stopped at the first of them, a frigid hothouse whose front tipped forward over the street in defiance of gravity, taste, and ordinance; inside, the tender daytime flowers could be seen huddling in family groups beneath a constant, unseen sun, and behind them was the hermetic door to the dark Cactus Room where the shy nocturnal plants, genus cereus, could bloom in privacy at any hour. Vivien, once out of the car, appeared less constrained. She did not have that stiffness so many have on first entering bars, that air of waiting stubbornly for alcohol to loosen them, which so often presages their manner when it comes' time for bed. She was already excited when the martinis came.

Occasionally, a prickly pear cactus blocked my path. I maneuvered around the larger, invincible plants, but stomped down the weaker, two-foot-high cacti that were in my way As we struggled to carry the two hundred pound litter, twilight deepened and it became harder and harder to see. I aggressively stomped what I thought was a small cactus that was in my way. In the growing shadows I didn’t realize that I was only seeing the top two feet of a giant cactus that jutted above the lip of an arroyo. The rest of the massive cactus was hidden below the edge of the gully. My stomp carried me forward over the edge of the drop-off. I instinctively let go of the litter, extended my arms to break my fall and tumbled into the welcoming embrace of the “mother of all” cacti. My spontaneous girlish, high pitched scream startled everyone into immobility, stopping their forward travel. My bemused teammates cautiously peered over the ledge and saw me crucified on a giant prickly pear cactus. I felt like I was nailed to the plant, unable to move a muscle. Apparently, my rampant stomping of baby cacti had earned me bad cactus karma and the enmity of Mother Nature. As my teammates carefully pried me off the bloody cactus patch, I swear I could hear the other nearby cacti chuckling softly.

But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.” Here He, the holy One, is in contrast to every good man in all past ages. It was never known that God forsook a righteous man. There He is on that Cross, the absolutely righteous One, dying, forsaken of God. Oh, He says, I have gone down lower than any man ever went before, “I am a worm, and no man.” The word He used for worm is the word “tola,” and the tola of the orient is a little worm something like the cochineal of Mexico which feeds on a certain kind of cactus. The people beat these plants until the cochineal fall into a basin and then they crush those little insects and the blood is that brilliant crimson dye that makes those bright Mexican garments. In Palestine and Syria they use the tola in the same way and it makes the beautiful permanent scarlet dye of the orient It was very expensive and was worn only by the great and the rich and the noble. It is referred to again and again in Scripture. Solomon is said to have clothed the maidens of Israel in scarlet. Daniel was to be clothed in scarlet by Belshazzar. And that word “scarlet” is literally “the splendor of a worm.” “They shall be clothed in the splendor of a worm.” Now the Lord Jesus Christ says, “I am a worm; I am the tola,” and He had to be crushed in death that you and I might be clothed in glory. The glorious garments of our salvation are the garments that have been procured as a result of His death and His suffering.

What would six dollars and fifty cents buy? Not a tape deck for Marla. Maybe a Christmas flower arrangement special for Mom. But she loved roses. He’d buy her one long-stemmed rose and get Dad a cactus plant. Something with prickers that you better not touch should suit him.

He confided to me that he was taking part in an “experiment” to learn about the effects of mescaline—a substance I now know is extracted from a cactus.

When I was in Mexico, I was told how mescaline was extracted from the peyote cactus.

Earth Dragon Hybrids Earth + Fire= Flaming Rock Dragon or Volcano Dragon Earth + Plant= Tropical Dragon, Mud Dragon, Cactus Dragon, or Waterfall Dragon Earth + Electric= Chameleon Dragon or Star Dragon Earth + Ice= Snow Flake Dragon or Alpine Dragon Earth + Metal= Armadillo Dragons Earth + Dark= Venom Dragon or Hedgehog Dragon Fire Dragon Hybrids Fire + Earth= Flaming Rock Dragon or Volcano Dragon

Cactus are most horrible plant by hurting you with their thorn. But its the only thing which make you survive in Dessert.

In the desert, life-threatening stresses aren’t a crisis; they are a normal feature of the life cycle. Extreme stress is part of the very landscape, not something a plant can avoid or ameliorate. Survival depends on the cactus’s ability to tolerate deathly grim dry spells over and over again. If you meet a barrel cactus that’s tall enough to touch your knee, it is likely to be more than twenty-five years old. Cactuses grow slowly in the desert—during the years when they do grow, that is. A

Cactus Andante In the desert of Peru grows a cactus with legs. This plant from the Cactus family is the only highly developed flowering plant that has been noticed walking. Cactus Andante is also known as “the crawling devil.” It has a snake-like body branching out in all directions.

She’d been surprised to learn it had a semi-arid climate, with cactus plants growing right beside palm trees.

In 1943, when evidence of the scale of Nazi atrocities in Europe was already familiar, Simon lectured a group of Jewish eighteen-year-olds: ‘We are entering a country populated by another people and are not showing that people any consideration,’ he warned. ‘The Arabs are afraid we may force them out of here.’ The youngsters’ response was hostile, truculent and highly revealing: ‘Which is more ethical?’ one of them asked. ‘To leave Jews to be annihilated in the diaspora or to bring them in the face of opposition to Palestine and to carry out a transfer, even by force, of Arabs to Arab countries?’ It was an attitude that was increasingly prevalent among the so-called ‘Sabra’ generation of Jews who were born or raised in Palestine (named after the cactus-like plant that was prickly on the outside but soft inside), and who were to fight and rise to public prominence in the years to come. ‘Reference to the aspiration for peace and the desire for Arab–Jewish friendship became a kind of ritualised convention, repeated without any deep conviction’,19 in the words of one mainstream Israeli historian. Ihud leaders held discussions with Arab leaders in Palestine and the neighbouring countries. But these efforts were ‘unavailing as long as the official leadership on both sides looked on them with disdain’.

Consequences were chasing her, and even though a good, upstanding citizen of the empire might choose to face those consequences. . . I have a spider plant, a cactus, and a chicken to think of

The hemp plant entered Mexico, as we have seen, after Washington and other Virginia planters enthusiastically spread it around the southern United States. As early as 1902, anthropologist Carl Lumholtz observed that some of the Indians in northwestern Mexico were using its leaves in religious rites whenever the peyote cactus was unavailable. They called it rosa maria (Rosemary) but whether they anthropomorphized it and considered it a goddess (like Peyote Woman) is not clear. In the Tepe-hua region, rosa maria became santa rosa (Saint Rose), but elsewhere it became maria juana (Mary Jane) – and, hence our modern name, marijuana. Under the latter title it was celebrated in the famous marching song of Pancho Villa’s rebels during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920:

Have you ever looked closely at the blossom of a Christmas cactus? It is exquisite. When this plant is in full bloom, doing dishes turns into an act of worship for me. My hands are in the suds, but my eyes are delighted by the blossoms in front of me. I can’t help but turn my heart to the Lord who spoke a plant like this into existence. He declared this to be good.

Clover and Jotter’s names are still remembered in the botany and river running communities. A hedgehog cactus with pink flowers and dense spines that grows in New Mexico is named Clover’s cactus (Sclerocactus cloverae); it’s now under consideration for endangered species protection. River rafters in Cataract Canyon, rediscovering places once buried beneath Lake Powell and now revealed by drought, informally call two side canyons Clover Canyon and Jotter Canyon, in a stretch of river known as Botany Aisle. Scientists raft the Grand Canyon every year, carrying a plant guide shaped in part by Clover and Jotter’s findings. Their story matters. It adds to the unfolding record of how life, human and nonhuman, finds ways to flourish even in the most unlikely of circumstances. Like others before them, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter valued their curiosity about the world more than their presumed place within it. They go ahead and, like stars reflected on the river, show the way.

But cacti know the real trick. Sometime in the last 35 million years, they rolled up their primordial leaves into spines, the most daring fashion accessory of the season. Multipurpose, too: a useful defense against nibblers, and a kind of sunshade and air-conditioning system in one. In the absence of leaves, photosynthesis moved to the green, leathery skin. Here another innovation took place: cacti learned to keep their pores (known as stomata) closed during the day, to prevent moisture from siphoning away into the unforgiving sky. They open their pores only during the cool hours of the night, squirreling away pockets of carbon dioxide, and complete the task of making sugar during the day. They also store water under their waxy skins and quickly grow networks of tiny roots after rain to siphon up moisture. One good storm can sustain a cactus through several years of drought. For all this, cacti can be extravagant too, coming out in showy blossoms in shades of cerise, gold, and crimson as gaudy as any high school prom dress. Clover and Jotter couldn’t have known all this (the details of cactus photosynthesis wouldn’t be worked out for decades). But in cataloging plants that thrived in extremes, they were adding to the general picture of evolution and adaptation, tracing the subtle threads of a tapestry that had been in the making for 3.5 billion years.

[Taloma] offered prayers for us and for our troubled country and world. She invoked the spirit of the cactus in teaching us how to heal ourselves and how, once healed, we could better help to heal others. "We are our own best healers,” she said. What came next? Taloma spoke of the ripples in water and how far they could travel. She prayed for us to become ripples of healing, traveling out from this room to repair the world before it was too late.

Where I walked it was open. The openness was part of the dharma I could not penetrate. There was nothing to indicate that this object rather than that one was significant. A person could go crazy not knowing where to look. The openness imposed an obligation. I had to look at objects and past them, simultaneously. It was certain: no thing was an end. Behind this cactus was another. A rock that stopped my eye one moment became trivial the next. I was obliged to grow indifferent even to a sight I loved. I had to see that the place on which I thought my eyes could rest, they could not rest. Where I walked it was trackless. If I looked down at the path, I saw only the piece of trail where I was: definite, but incomplete. If I looked ahead, I saw an entire landscape, but I was outside of it. Ahead, everything was visible—the trail across the valley on flat ground, the grasses, the century plants—but it lacked depth. All I could count on was the heat, which I couldn't see. If here was where I had to stop, the heat would grind me into the dust on which I walked. - Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain

The first sacrifice of the war was her flowers. We kept our shades closed to avoid being sprayed with bullets. Without sunlight, her cactus and hibiscus withered. During the fighting, patriotic anthems took over the radio - when we had batteries to listen. To avoid any trouble, she turned the music off. She had to watch, mute, while her plants died one by one.

The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation.

(Originally, jealousy pertained solely to plants, other people’s cactus or ginkgoes, or, later, when there was grass, grass, which is why, even to this day, we say that someone is green with jealousy.)