Plant Propagation Quotes

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Humans are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise both will wither and die.
B.R. Ambedkar
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you directly without problems or pride: I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love, except in this form in which I am not nor are you, so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets)
Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Humans by ANN DRUYAN' 'CARL SAGAN (1992-05-03))
I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries hidden within itself the light of those flowers, and thanks to your love, darkly in my body lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.
Pablo Neruda
I'd love to see a new form of social security ... everyone taught how to grow their own; fruit and nut trees planted along every street, parks planted out to edibles, every high rise with a roof garden, every school with at least one fruit tree for every kid enrolled.
Jackie French (New Plants from Old: Simple, Natural, No-cost Plant Propagation)
fiction has served to propagate the notion that courtesans ply their trade in the area and that geiko spend the night with their customers. Once an idea like this is planted in the general culture it takes on a life of its own. I understand that there are some scholars of Japan in foreign countries who also believe these misconceptions to be true. But
Mineko Iwasaki (Geisha of Gion: The True Story of Japan's Foremost Geisha (Memoir of Mineko Iwasaki))
Quite simply, plants don’t want to be eaten—and who can blame them? Like any living thing, their instinct is to propagate the next generation of their species.
Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)
Yellow bells Meaning: Welcome to a stranger Geleznowia verrucosa | Western Australia A small shrub with great yellow flowers. Sun loving, drought tolerant and requiring a well-drained soil. Will grow in a little shade, but sun for most of the day is essential. Makes a wonderful cut flower, although fickleness in propagation and seed germination make this a rare plant.
Holly Ringland (The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart)
But weren’t we also talking about the white pines? What do they get out of it? This is how the white pines propagate. It is a form of pollination, or rather an innovation on pollination as we usually define it.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
God planted in men a strong desire also of propagating their kind, and continuing themselves in their posterity; and this gives children a title to share in the property of their parents, and a right to inherit their possessions.
John Locke (Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (Rethinking the Western Tradition))
You explained how certain plants are known to propagate by sending seeds out on the breeze or on the rushing waters,” I reminded him. “Your friendships are strong, like those plants. The word has been passed, and as a result, your family’s needs will be met.” A
Carol Wall (Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart)
The first-known cultivated cherry in Japan was a weeping cherry, a form of Edo-higan. Aristocrats were enchanted by the way in which the thin, supple branches bent over towards the ground, giving the illusion of tears when the tree blossomed, and so they propagated this mutation by collecting seeds and planting them in their gardens.
Naoko Abe (The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms)
Plants continually monitor every aspect of their environment: spatial orientation; presence, absence, and identity of neighbors; disturbance; competition; predation, whether microbial, insect, or animal; composition of atmosphere; composition of soil; water presence, location, and amount; degree of incoming light; propagation, protection, and support of offspring (yes, they recognize kin); communications from other plants in their ecorange; biological oscillations, including circadian; and not only their own health but the health of the ecorange in which they live. As Anthony Trewavas comments, this “continually and specifically changes the information spectrum” to which the plants are attending.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
First, by what means it is that a Plant, or any Part of it, comes to Grow, a Seed to put forth a Root and Trunk... How the Aliment by which a Plant is fed, is duly prepared in its several Parts ... How not only their Sizes, but also their Shapes are so exceedingly various ... Then to inquire, What should be the reason of their various Motions; that the Root should descend; that its descent should sometimes be perpendicular, sometimes more level: That the Trunk doth ascend, and that the ascent thereof, as to the space of Time wherein it is made, is of different measures... Further, what may be the Causes as of the Seasons of their Growth; so of the Periods of their Lives; some being Annual, others Biennial, others Perennial ... what manner the Seed is prepared, formed and fitted for Propagation.
Nehemiah Grew
Self-organizing Systems Biologists have long given up the idea that living organisms are just like machines. Medical practitioners today recognize the ineffectiveness of treating the human body as a separate mechanism. They speak about holistic healing, treating the whole person, and including the person’s social and physical environment. Today living organisms are described as self-regulating systems. They organize themselves, nourish themselves, heal themselves, propagate themselves, protect themselves, and interact creatively with other systems. We used to call this instinct—in animals if not in plants. Today we talk about genes that have coded messages or instructions that connect with one another in a DNA spiral in the nucleus of every living cell. If we were to write out the instructions contained in any one tiny DNA spiral we would fill about a thousand books of six hundred pages each.
Albert Nolan (Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom)
Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis—many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels—and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous. Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. (The term calcifier applies to any organism that builds a shell or external skeleton or, in the case of plants, a kind of internal scaffolding out of the mineral calcium carbonate.)... Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to organisms that build shells or exoskeletons. Imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that’s required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive, and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve. This is why the limpets that wander too close to the vents at Castello Aragonese end up with holes in their shells. According to geologists who work in the area, the vents have been spewing carbon dioxide for at least several hundred years, maybe longer. Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so. “You give them generations on generations to survive in these conditions, and yet they’re not there,” Hall-Spencer observed.
Elizabeth Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History)
Neurons can be created in vitro by modifying the epigenesis of cnidarian cells, which suggests that the repeated evolution of functional neurons from non-neuronal cell lines cannot be too difficult to achieve. The evolvability of functional neurons is further supported by convergence on action potentials and information-transfer mechanisms in lineages for whom rapid sensory-motor mechanisms are either inaccessible or not required. For instance, action potentials have evolved in the first major origin of complex multicellularity: the green plants, some of whom, such as the carnivorous Venus flytrap, are capable of limited rapid movements. Such 'real-time' plant behaviors are made possible by action potentials that are analogous in certain ways to animal nervous systems. Mechanosensory stimulus triggers sensory hairs, which then generate a propagating action potential that initiates a rapid motor response - such as the snapping shut of two leaf lobes, resulting in the imprisonment of hapless insect prey. Though the precise biochemical mechanisms of this snapping mechanism are poorly understood, it is likely achieved by gated ion channels, which produce a flow of water or acid molecules that cause cells in the lobes to change shape, causing the lobes, which are held under tension, to snap shut. A basic memory system is also employed: to avoid snapping shut due to noise (such as raindrops), the snapping mechanism is only initiated when two stimuli separated in time by a few seconds are detected.
Russell Powell (Contingency and Convergence: Toward a Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind)
While the mechanisms involved in electrochemical signaling are complex, the basic principles are simple. Just as a battery maintains its charge by housing different electrolytes in different compartments, a cell has a charge owing to different amounts of various salts in and outside the cell. There is more sodium on the outside of cells and more potassium inside. (That's why salt balances are so important in our diets.) When a mechanoreceptor is activated, let's say by your thumb touching the spacebar on a keyboard, specific channels open up near the point of contact in the cell membrane that allow sodium to pass into the cell. This movement of sodium changes the electric charge, which leads to the opening of additional channels and increased sodium flux. This results in the depolarization that propagates along the length of the neuron like a wave propagating across the ocean.
Daniel Chamovitz (What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses)
My garden grows in its own good time. Every plant has its season. Lettuce comes up early and must be picked or else it will bolt. Kale gets planted late in the season because it loves the cool weather of fall. Asparagus takes years to prosper, and strawberries can take up to two seasons to provide a harvest. Frost-sensitive crops like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and zucchini love the sweltering, sultry heat of the depths of summer, when they propagate so passionately that the bees can barely keep up. Even though I know all of this, sometimes I can't wait to find out what's going to happen next.
Vivian Elisabeth Glyck
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking—the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
The combined biomass of all domesticated animals is now some twenty-five times that of all remaining wild terrestrial mammals. Some of our favored plants have become among the most widely propagated on the planet. Wheat, rice, coffee, and cannabis, to name a few, have gone worldwide by giving us what we want. You have to wonder who has been using whom, because in terms of evolutionary success, these plants have done well by us 7—others, not so much. Through our reworking of landscapes, especially for agriculture, we have destroyed and altered habitats and, often without realizing it, created new ones. We’ve
David Grinspoon (Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future)
Jour après jour, la puanteur disparaît des rues, remplacée par le suave parfum des fleurs de sophoras. Arrive l'été, avec une chaleur normale, un franc soleil baigne toutes les plantes qui croissent, verdoyantes. Dans les champs des environs, les beaux légumes poussent à vue d'œil. Une centaine de magnétophones apparaissent dans les rues de la ville; ils diffusent tous les jours des chansons célèbres à Taïwan ou sur le continent, sans que l'on sache très bien si ce sont les chansons populaires qui font se multiplier les magnétophones ou les magnétophones qui propagent les chansons. Quand une nouvelle boutique s'ouvre, pour attirer l'attention, elle diffuse à la porte des chansons qui soupirent de façon incongrue sur l'inconstance de l'amour, sans aucun rapport avec le commerce en question Même dans les cortèges de funérailles, on entend des enregistrements de chansons d'amour. Les chansons à la mode ne peuvent échapper au thème de l'amour, de même que la vie des gens ne peut échapper au sujet de l'amour. Ces chansons d'amour font perdre sa tranquillité à la petite ville qui devient bruyante. p 153-154
Wang Anyi (Love in a Small Town)
What, if not a death drive, would impel sexual beings towards a pre sexual form of reproduction (in the depths of our imagination, moreover, is it not precisely this scissiparous form of reproduction and proliferation based solely on contiguity that for us is death and the death drive?). And what, if not a death drive, would further impel us at the same time, on the metaphysical plane, to deny all otherness, to shun any alteration in the Same, and to seek nothing beyond the perpetuation of an identity, nothing but the transparency of a genetic inscription no longer subject even to the vicissitudes of procreation? But enough of the death drive. Are we faced here with a phantasy of selfgenesis? No, because such phantasies always involve the figures of the mother and the father - sexed parental figures whom the subject may indeed yearn to eliminate, the better to usurp their positions, but this in no sense implies contesting the symbolic structure of procreation: if you become your own child, you are still the child of someone. Cloning, on the other hand, radically eliminates not only the mother but also the father, for it eliminates the interaction between his genes and the mother's, the imbrication of the parents' differences, and above all the joint act of procreation. The cloner does not beget himself: he sprouts from each of his genes' segments. One may well speculate about the value of such plant-like shoots, which in effect resolve all Oedipal sexuality in favour of a 'non-human' sex, a sex based on contiguity and unmediated propagation. But at all events the phantasy of self-genesis is definitively out of the picture. Father and mother are gone, but their disappearance, far from widening an aleatory freedom for the subject, instead leaves the way clear for a matrix known as a code. No more mother, no more father: just a matrix. And it is this matrix, this genetic code, which is destined to 'give birth', from now till eternity, in an operational mode from which all chance sexual elements have been expunged.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
sociosexual propagation misfits.
Richard Plant (The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals)
One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you directly without problems or pride: I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love, except in this form in which I am not nor are you, so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
Pablo Neruda
the kingdom of God relies on a different value, one that places a great emphasis on partnership and community. Ministry has always been a team sport. While we do find examples in the Bible of individuals serving the Lord on their own (such as Elijah in 1 Kings 17–19 or Philip in Acts 8), the model of people colaboring takes priority. This is most evident in the disciple-making and church-planting efforts of the apostolic church. In the Gospels we read that Jesus sent out the seventy-two in teams (Lk 10:1), and the first missionaries from Antioch were the team of Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13:2-3). In God’s economy, the missionary team is vital to the propagation of the gospel and the multiplication of disciples, leaders and churches.
J.D. Payne (Apostolic Church Planting: Birthing New Churches from New Believers)
The battle between those who use propagating knives to take cuttings and those who use axes to fell trees is like the one between David and Goliath. But we know who won.
Carlos Magdalena (The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species)
If I say your name now and you turn your head and you do not recognize me then fuck, I don’t know. Then I am dreaming of you dreaming of me, again. Then I’ll wait here till you’re ready and while I’m waiting I’ll make my home here, in this undefinable space I can try to name and then try to name again until I give up on names altogether, just let them go through my fingers like water, like trying to remember the freakiest moments of a nightmare, but it’s too late—I’m already awake and the day is about to start and I have to set up a bird feeder and propagate more plants today. I have to hang up signs. I have to open up the windows. I have to look far out to see that line where the water becomes air
Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse)
A person can cultivate a new persona from a pâté of earthy personal experiences. How do I reconcile all my faults and propagate all my innate gifts to create the type of self that I am happy to claim responsibility for authorship? How do I go about turning over the peat moss that lines the feldspar of my rocky existence? How do I plow under the seedlings of my youth and grow a protective bed of winter clover to shield my adulthood? How do I mulch the clippings from variegated personal experiences, ferment the rot, harrow new rows, and plant hardy spring wheat to take root in the enriched chocolate loam of a fertile mind? Is all this laborious plow pulling work of creating a fresh and authentic self-identify worth the backbreaking effort? How does one go about revamping their personal storyline? How do I cast myself into a robust image that does not appall other people? My continued existence entails industriously giving seed to the lush myths that I live by, amassing dwindling personal willpower, and resolving to impose upon my weathered soul the missing character traits that wait forging in the glowering inferno fed by a rising mountain of ignited personal anxiety.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
As I grow wiser and more skeptical, I realize that almost everything in nomenclature comes full circle. The question remains whether I can outlast the taxonomists.
Michael A. Dirr (Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses)
pomologist, not to be confused with a thremmatologist, who is a propagator of plants and animals.
Jane S. Smith (The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants)