Pollen Plant Quotes

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.

Eat Food. Not Much. Mostly plants.

Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

Microphones made me feel as if I were speaking to the whole world. I had talked to only local TV stations and newspapers, but, still, I felt as if the wind would carry my words, the same way it scatters flower pollen in the spring, planting seeds all over the earth.

Nature is a living whole,' he later said, not a 'dead aggregate'. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind. It was this 'universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed' that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life - pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those 'organic powers are incessantly at work', he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important 'in their relation to the whole', he explained.

In Spain, hilly terrain and antiquated planting and harvest practices keep farmers from retrieving more than about 100 pounds [of almonds] per acre. Growers in the Central Valley, by contrast can expect up to 3000 pounds an acre. But for all their sophisticated strategies to increase yield and profitability, almond growers still have one major problem - pollination. Unless a bird or insect brings the pollen from flower to flower, even the most state-of-the-art orchard won't grow enough nuts. An almond grower who depends on wind and a few volunteer pollinators in this desert of cultivation can expect only 40 pounds of almonds per acre. If he imports honey bees, the average yield is 2,400 pounds per acre, as much as 3,000 in more densely planted orchards. To build an almond, it takes a bee.

People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds.

Blue, as herself, cannot survive. Red, as herself, cannot reach her. But they have sprinkled bits of themselves through time. Ink and ingenuity, flakes of skin on paper, bits of pollen, blood, oil, down, a goose’s heart. Rocks laid for later avalanches. If you want to change a plant, start from its root.

As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend, so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man. A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic characters and nations.

Love is like dust made of fine particles of solid matter- composed of many materials including dead skin cells of heart. A dust storm always blankets me and in the end the amount of plant pollen and animal fur tend to keep me safe.

Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze told Politico, in a story about his work headlined “The Great Nutrient Collapse.” “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history—[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.” Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third. The problem has gotten worse as carbon concentrations have gotten worse. Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse, since so many of the world’s poor depend on crops, rather than animal meat, for protein; 138 million could suffer from a deficiency of zinc, essential to healthy pregnancies; and 1.4 billion could face a dramatic decline in dietary iron—pointing to a possible epidemic of anemia. In 2018, a team led by Chunwu Zhu looked at the protein content of eighteen different strains of rice, the staple crop for more than 2 billion people, and found that more carbon dioxide in the air produced nutritional declines across the board—drops in protein content, as well as in iron, zinc, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9. Really everything but vitamin E. Overall, the researchers found that, acting just through that single crop, rice, carbon emissions could imperil the health of 600 million people. In previous centuries, empires were built on that crop. Climate change promises another, an empire of hunger, erected among the world’s poor.

BOWLS OF FOOD Moon and evening star do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe. The purpose of every gathering is discovered: to recognize beauty and love what’s beautiful. “Once it was like that, now it’s like this,” the saying goes around town, and serious consequences too. Men and women turn their faces to the wall in grief. They lose appetite. Then they start eating the fire of pleasure, as camels chew pungent grass for the sake of their souls. Winter blocks the road. Flowers are taken prisoner underground. Then green justice tenders a spear. Go outside to the orchard. These visitors came a long way, past all the houses of the zodiac, learning Something new at each stop. And they’re here for such a short time, sitting at these tables set on the prow of the wind. Bowls of food are brought out as answers, but still no one knows the answer. Food for the soul stays secret. Body food gets put out in the open like us. Those who work at a bakery don’t know the taste of bread like the hungry beggars do. Because the beloved wants to know, unseen things become manifest. Hiding is the hidden purpose of creation: bury your seed and wait. After you die, All the thoughts you had will throng around like children. The heart is the secret inside the secret. Call the secret language, and never be sure what you conceal. It’s unsure people who get the blessing. Climbing cypress, opening rose, Nightingale song, fruit, these are inside the chill November wind. They are its secret. We climb and fall so often. Plants have an inner Being, and separate ways of talking and feeling. An ear of corn bends in thought. Tulip, so embarrassed. Pink rose deciding to open a competing store. A bunch of grapes sits with its feet stuck out. Narcissus gossiping about iris. Willow, what do you learn from running water? Humility. Red apple, what has the Friend taught you? To be sour. Peach tree, why so low? To let you reach. Look at the poplar, tall but without fruit or flower. Yes, if I had those, I’d be self-absorbed like you. I gave up self to watch the enlightened ones. Pomegranate questions quince, Why so pale? For the pearl you hid inside me. How did you discover my secret? Your laugh. The core of the seen and unseen universes smiles, but remember, smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter. Dark earth receives that clear and grows a trunk. Melon and cucumber come dragging along on pilgrimage. You have to be to be blessed! Pumpkin begins climbing a rope! Where did he learn that? Grass, thorns, a hundred thousand ants and snakes, everything is looking for food. Don’t you hear the noise? Every herb cures some illness. Camels delight to eat thorns. We prefer the inside of a walnut, not the shell. The inside of an egg, the outside of a date. What about your inside and outside? The same way a branch draws water up many feet, God is pulling your soul along. Wind carries pollen from blossom to ground. Wings and Arabian stallions gallop toward the warmth of spring. They visit; they sing and tell what they think they know: so-and-so will travel to such-and-such. The hoopoe carries a letter to Solomon. The wise stork says lek-lek. Please translate. It’s time to go to the high plain, to leave the winter house. Be your own watchman as birds are. Let the remembering beads encircle you. I make promises to myself and break them. Words are coins: the vein of ore and the mine shaft, what they speak of. Now consider the sun. It’s neither oriental nor occidental. Only the soul knows what love is. This moment in time and space is an eggshell with an embryo crumpled inside, soaked in belief-yolk, under the wing of grace, until it breaks free of mind to become the song of an actual bird, and God.

People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds. It was a complex, dynamic process which she never ceased to find fascinating. And which she knew most people simply didn’t understand. But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

In Scandanavia, 'Iverson finds that the whole spectrum of pollen deposits is altered when (in early Neolithic times) ... the first farmers appear. Cereal pollens increase. Plants of oak woodland lessen and disappear; birch pollen increases rapidly -- it is one of the trees which can come in after an extensive burn. For the pollen record, the effect of early agriculture is as severe as a shift in climate.

Plants: infinite plants, not one species known to the visitors from the house of Man. Infinite shades and intensities of green, violet, purple, brown, red. Infinite silences. Only the wind moved, swaying leaves and fronds, a warm soughing wind laden with spores and pollens, blowing the sweet pale-green dust over prairies of great grasses, heaths that bore no heather, flowerless forests where no foot had ever walked, no eye had ever looked. A warm, sad world, sad and serene.

There was a time when I teetered precariously with an awkward foot in each of two worlds - the scientific and the Indigenous. But then I learned to fly. Or at least try. It was the bees that showed me how to move between different flowers - to drink the nectar and gather pollen from both. It is this dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge, a new way of being in the world. After all, there aren't two worlds, there is just this one good green earth.

If he does it right and is lucky, in nine or 10 months he scoops the tiny half-inch seedlings out of the bottle and plants them in community pots. A year later he transplants them to individual three-inch pots and in another two years to 4 1/2-inch pots, and crosses his fingers. Then, five or six or seven years since the day he put pollen to stigma, he sees an orchid no one ever saw before. It is different from any orchid that has ever bloomed, including those in the Garden of Eden.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic characters and nations.

Beyond a fence, they came to the swimming pool, which spilled over into a series of waterfalls and smaller rocky pools. The area was planted with huge ferns. “Isn’t this extraordinary?” Ed Regis said. “Especially on a misty day, these plants really contribute to the prehistoric atmosphere. These are authentic Jurassic ferns, of course.” Ellie paused to look more closely at the ferns. Yes, it was just as he said: Serenna veriformans, a plant found abundantly in fossils more than two hundred million years old, now common only in the wetlands of Brazil and Colombia. But whoever had decided to place this particular fern at poolside obviously didn’t know that the spores of veriformans contained a deadly beta-carboline alkaloid. Even touching the attractive green fronds could make you sick, and if a child were to take a mouthful, he would almost certainly die—the toxin was fifty times more poisonous than oleander. People were so naïve about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction—and defense. But Ellie knew that, in the earth’s history, plants had evolved as competitively as animals, and in some ways more fiercely. The poison in Serenna veriformans was a minor example of the elaborate chemical arsenal of weapons that plants had evolved. There were terpenes, which plants spread to poison the soil around them and inhibit competitors; alkaloids, which made them unpalatable to insects and predators (and children); and pheromones, used for communication. When a Douglas fir tree was attacked by beetles, it produced an anti-feedant chemical—and so did other Douglas firs in distant parts of the forest. It happened in response to a warning alleochemical secreted by the trees that were under attack. People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds. It was a complex, dynamic process which she never ceased to find fascinating. And which she knew most people simply didn’t understand. But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

Rye growers face another challenge: the grain is vulnerable to a fungus called ergot (Claviceps purpurea). The spores attack open flowers, pretending to be a grain of pollen, which gives them access to the ovary. Once inside, the fungus takes the place of the embryonic grain along the stalk, sometimes looking so much like grain that it is difficult to spot an infected plant. Until the late nineteenth century, botanists thought the odd dark growths were part of the normal appearance of rye. Although the fungus does not kill the plant, it is toxic to people: it contains a precursor to LSD that survives the process of being brewed into beer or baked into bread. While a psychoactive beer might sound appealing, the reality was quite horrible. Ergot poisoning causes miscarriage, seizures, and psychosis, and it can be deadly. In the Middle Ages, outbreaks called St. Anthony’s fire or dancing mania made entire villages go crazy at once. Because rye was a peasant grain, outbreaks of the illness were more common among the lower class, fueling revolutions and peasant uprisings. Some historians have speculated that the Salem witch trials came about because girls poisoned by ergot had seizures that led townspeople to conclude that they’d been bewitched. Fortunately, it’s easy to treat rye for ergot infestation: a rinse in a salt solution kills the fungus.

Inside, the air was warm, humid. A mist hung. As this husband and wife strolled the rows arm in arm, the plants seemed to take notice—their swiveling blossoms followed in our lovers’ wake, as if to drink in the full flavor of Sun Moon’s honor and modesty. The couple stopped, deep in the hothouse, to recumbently enjoy the splendor of North Korea’s leadership. An army of hummingbirds hovered above them, expert pollinators of the state, the buzzing thrum of their wing beats penetrating the souls of our lovers, all the while dazzling them with the iridescent flash of their throats and the way their long flower-kissing tongues flicked in delight. Around Sun Moon, blossoms opened, the petals spreading wide to reveal hidden pollen pots. Commander Ga dripped with sweat, and in his honor, groping stamens emanated their scent in clouds of sweet spoor that coated our lovers’ bodies with the sticky seed of socialism. Sun Moon offered her Juche to him, and he gave her all he had of Songun policy. At length, in depth, their spirited exchange culminated in a mutual exclaim of Party understanding. Suddenly, all the plants in the hothouse shuddered and dropped their blossoms, leaving a blanket upon which Sun Moon could recline as a field of butterflies ticklishly alighted upon her innocent skin. Finally, citizens, Sun Moon has shared her convictions with her husband!

Large-leafed plants at the edge of the jungle reflected the sun rather than soaking it up, their dark green surfaces sparkling white in the sunlight. Some of the smaller ones had literally low-hanging fruit, like jewels from a fairy tale. Behind them was an extremely inviting path into the jungle with giant white shells for stepping-stones. And rather than the muggy, disease-filled forests of books that seemed to kill so many explorers, here the air was cool and pleasant and not too moist- although Wendy could hear the distant tinkle of water splashing from a height. "Oh! Is that the Tonal Spring? Or Diamond Falls?" Wendy withered breathlessly. "Luna, let's go see!" She made herself not race ahead down the path, but moved at a leisurely, measured pace. Like an adventuress sure of herself but wary of her surroundings. (And yet, as she wouldn't realize until later, she hadn't thought to grab her stockings or shoes. Those got left in her hut without even a simple goodbye.) Everywhere she looked, Wendy found another wonder of Never Land, from the slow camosnails to the gently nodding heads of the fritillary lilies. She smiled, imagining John as he peered over his glasses and the snail faded away into the background in fear- or Michael getting his nose covered in honey-scented lily pollen as he enthusiastically sniffed the pretty flowers. The path continued, winding around a boulder into a delightful little clearing, sandy but padded here and there with tuffets of emerald green grass and clumps of purple orchids. It was like a desert island vacation of a perfect English meadow.

But your genes can also be different from those of your parents just through random mutation, which is the imperfect copying from one strand of DNA to another. It can literally be a cosmic ray from outer space that knocks into one of your genes and changes it. Genes sometimes jump from one place on the DNA molecule to another. These are called transposon genes. It could be that your parent’s eggs or sperm (or a plant’s ova and pollen) got messed with a little by some chemical. It could be radiation from some radioactive elements in Earth’s crust that caused a mutation. Sometimes viruses get into the reproductive cells of an organism and modify its genes. Virus manipulation can also be exploited deliberately—to adjust the genes of corn plants so they are tolerant of aggressive weed killer, for example.

Golden children ran wild over a field of dead great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and the bones must have wanted to rise up and knock together and rattle with joy. I have never seen a town that gave so much—so much of what counts—to its children. More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own.

The moral system must become a natural system. All sickness is the equivalent of sin; it is through an excess that it is transcended. Our sicknesses are all phenomena of a heightened sensation that in great force will overflow. As man would become God, he sins-- The sickness of plants is animalization; the sickness of animals is rationalization; the sickness of stones is vegetation. Shouldn't each plant correspond to a stone and to an animal? Reality of sympathy. Parallelisms of the natural realm. --Plants are dead stones; animals are dead plants, and so forth. Theory of metempsychosis.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.

The eye, lulled by the all-around green all around, registers the difference and rouses. Bees, once thought to be color-blind, do in fact see color, though they see it differently than we do. Green appears gray, a background hue against which red—which bees perceive as black—stands out most sharply. (Bees can also see at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where we’re blind; a garden in this light must look like a big-city airport at night, lit up and color-coded to direct circling bees to landing zones of nectar and pollen.)

Lady’s slipper orchids have a special hinged lip that traps bees and forces them to pass through sticky threads of pollen as they struggle to escape through the back of the plant.

In many ways, Kaua‘i is the ultimate example of what a world would look like if plants were in charge. The whole island is covered in the surreal products of total floral freedom. When plants are allowed to evolve without fear, they get scrupulously and flamboyantly specific. Take the Hibiscadelphus genus, for example. Found only in Hawai‘i, these plants have long tubular flowers, custom-made to fit the hooked beak of the honeycreeper, the precise bird that pollinates them. Then there is the vulcan palm, Brighamia insignis, or ‘Ōlulu in Hawaiian, a short tree best described by its nickname, “cabbage on a stick.” Over tens of thousands of years, it has evolved to be pollinated only by the extremely rare fabulous green sphinx moth (its real name). The vulcan palm, still critically endangered in the wild, was saved from total extinction by Perlman’s work in the early days of the extinction prevention program, when he made his own harness out of knotted ropes and used it to hang over the Nā Pali Coast cliffs. There, four thousand feet in the air, he would use a small cosmetic brush borrowed from his wife to imitate the moth, carefully transferring the pollen from the males to the females. “You’d know if you did it well,” Perlman said. “When you’d go back, there’d be fruits just bursting open with seed.” (The vulcan palm is now cultivated as a houseplant in the Netherlands, where there are greenhouses full of them. I wonder if a person with a potted Vulcan palm on their Amsterdam windowsill knows of the drama it took to get it there.)

The moth that pollinates the flower of a plant is the same species that devours the plants’ leaves when it is still a caterpillar. It is not, then, in the plant’s interest to completely destroy the grazing caterpillars that will metamorphose into the very creatures it relies on to spread its pollen.

David Dilcher wrote, “flowering plants were the first advertisers in the world. They put out beautiful petals, colorful patterns, fragrances, and gave a reward, such as nectar or pollen, for any insect that would come and visit them.

Each grain of pollen may be likened to a sort of box. Inside are the plant's reproductive cells. It is essential for these cells to be well concealed to protect their life and keep them safe from external dangers. For this reason the structure of the box is very strong. The box is surrounded by a wall called the "sporoderm." The outermost layer of this wall, called exine, is the most resistant material known in the organic world, and its chemical make-up has not yet been fully analysed. This material is generally very resistant to damage from acids or enzymes. It is f u r t h e r m o re unaffected by high temperature and pre s s u re. As we have seen, very detailed precautions have been taken to protect the pollen, which is essential for the continued existence of plants. The grains have been very specially wrapped up. Thanks to this, whatever method the pollen is dispersed by, it can remain alive even miles away from the p a rent plant. Besides the fact that pollen grains are coated with a very resistant material, they are also dispersed in very large numbers, which guarantees the multiplication of that plant.

My doctor has given me as strong an antihistamine as she is allowed to prescribe, but even that does nothing for the itching and swelling. The moment a grain of pollen enters the keep, I begin to tomato, and after two minutes of being exposed to the Ejaculateum Arboratoeaea, I am lying on the ground with my tongue lolling out of the side of my mouth. I am heartily glad that the trees and plants are still interested in copulatory activities; I only wish they would be so good as to keep their sperm away from my face. Do not pretend that pollen is anything else; it transfers haploid male genetic material and sullies the bedclothes unmercifully.

I am heartily glad that the trees and plants are still interested in copulatory activities; I only wish they would be so good as to keep their sperm away from my face. Do not pretend that pollen is anything else; it transfers haploid male genetic material and sullies the bedclothes unmercifully.

seeds engineered so that the plant produces sterile seeds or no seeds at all. Farmers are then forced to purchase new seeds every year. It’s thought that pollen from plants with the terminator trait could infect neighboring crop fields, rendering those plants infertile. Globally, more than a billion people depend on small, often marginal farm holdings for their food. What could possibly go wrong here?

Around Sun Moon, blossoms opened, the petals spreading wide to reveal hidden pollen pots. Commander Ga dripped with sweat, and in his honor, groping stamens emanated their scent in clouds of sweet spoor that coated our lovers’ bodies with the sticky seed of socialism. Sun Moon offered her Juche to him, and he gave her all he had of Songun policy. At length, in depth, their spirited exchange culminated in a mutual exclaim of Party understanding. Suddenly, all the plants in the hothouse shuddered and dropped their blossoms, leaving a blanket upon which Sun Moon could recline as a field of butterflies ticklishly alighted upon her innocent skin.

image. It made masturbation mass murder. Pollen, which blew about in spring in quantities great enough to fur a pond in a coat of yellow, was an even larger, if less heart-wrenching, waste of life. While Nature was obviously prodigal of youth—in early eighteenth-century London, almost half the children died before their second birthday—this level of carnage was hard to accept.

The purpose was to insure that their regular pollinators - animals that would best serve the plant, not chance visitors that raided its pollen and nectar - would be most likely to revisit it. Flowers that are fertilized by bees, for instance, are hardly ever red since most bees have difficulty seeing this color. The motion of certain flowers in the wind apparently attracts some animal pollinators, while other flowers display patterns of color - dots or lines that converge at the entrance to the food supply to lead the insect to it.

Long before scientists understood hybridization, Native Americans had discovered that by taking the pollen from the tassel of one corn plant and dusting it on the silks of another, they could create new plants that combined the traits of both parents. American Indians were the world’s first plant breeders, developing literally thousands of distinct cultivars for every conceivable environment and use.

His trousers, in particular, have become so adhesive with the mixed fat and resin that pine needles, thin flakes and fibres of bark, hair, mica scales and minute grains of quartz, hornblende, etc., feathers, seed wings, moth and butterfly wings, legs and antennae of innumerable insects, or even whole insects such as the small beetles, moths and mosquitoes, with flower petals, pollen dust and indeed bits of all plants, animals, and minerals of the region adhere to them and are safely embedded, so that though far from being a naturalist he collects fragmentary specimens of everything and becomes richer than he knows.

In recent years, the application of archaeozoology (the study of animal remains) and palaeoethnobotany (the study of botanical remains–including palynology, the analysis of pollen grains in soil) has begun to make an increasing impact on the study of the ancient Near East in general and the Levant in particular. They shed light, for example, on the ancient environments, the domestication of plants and animals, diet, various cultural practices, and even such things as trade (showing, for example, whether wood used for building was local or imported). Of particular interest for the study of the Bible has been evidence for the domestication of and the eating of the pig, in view of the biblical prohibitions (for example, Lev. 11: 7). Evidence suggests that, after the Middle Bronze Age, apart from its use by the Philistines, the eating of the pig was not common until the Hellenistic period. The

In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods---strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes---that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out. Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer's dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.

I wish . . . I wish that I could . . . feel you better,” she said, wishing she knew a better way to say it. “I just, I can’t quite get at what I’m trying to reach. It’s like your skin is in the way. At the Academy I would slice my sample open, but obviously that’s not an option right now,” she said with a laugh. “What else do you do when you can’t figure out what a plant does? Besides cut it open, I mean,” Tamani asked. “Smell it,” Laurel responded automatically. “I can taste the ones that aren’t poisonous.” “Taste?” She looked up at Tamani, at his half smile. “No,” she said, instantly knowing what he had in mind. “No, no, no, n—” Her words were cut off as two pollen-dusted hands cupped Laurel’s cheeks and Tamani pressed his mouth against hers, parting her lips with his own.

Politicians and political parties, particularly in America, rely on them to fund election campaigns. They are powerful lobbyists. Which is why the US has not banned the use of neonicotinoids, and thousands of tons of the stuff are still being used on crops there every year. Biggest usage is on oilseed rape. They coat the seeds with insecticide, so that, when it germinates, the insecticide is diffused throughout the plant, including the nectar and pollen that’s harvested by the bees.

When you are growing strawberries, pay close attention to the climate you create for them. Provide eight to twelve hours of light and keep it on a routine schedule. Pay close attention to your strawberry plants as they grow, since the buds will need to be pollinated by hand. This is done by taking a brush and brushing pollen from the male flowers into the female flowers. This should be done once a day, starting from when flowers begin to open. Provide a temperature between 60F and 80F, with 70F being just perfect. The temperature at night needs to be reduced by a few degrees.

In the rush to market, experiments have been carried out on a large scale in the natural environment, when controlled laboratory testing would have been far more effective and informative. The British Government sanctioned large-scale planting of genetically modified plants in order to test whether their pollen spread only a few meters (as expected) and to make sure that the new gene would not be spontaneously incorporated into other species of plants (ditto). It turned out that the pollen spread for miles, and the new genes could transfer without difficulty to other plants. Effects like this could, for example, create pesticide-resistant strains of weeds. By the time the experiment had revealed that the conventional wisdom was wrong, there was no way to get the pollen, or its genes, back. Simple laboratory tests – such as painting pollen onto plants directly – could have established the same facts more cheaply, without releasing anything into the environment. It was a bit like fireproofing chemical by spraying it on a city and setting the place alight, with the added twist that the ‘fire’ might spread indefinitely if, contrary to expectations, it took hold.

And so about a hundred million years ago plants stumbled on a way - actually a few thousand different ways - of getting animals to carry them, and their genes, here and there. This was the evolutionary watershed associated with the advent of the angiosperms, an extraordinary new class of plants that made showy flowers and formed large seeds that other species were induced to disseminate. Plants began evolving burrs that attach to animal fur like Velcro, flowers that seduce honeybees in order to powder their thighs with pollen, and acorns that squirrels obligingly taxi from one forest to another, bury, and then, just often enough, forget to eat. Even evolution evolves. About ten thousand years ago the world witnessed a second flowering of plant diversity that we would come to call, somewhat self-centeredly, 'the invention of agriculture.' A group of angiosperms refined their basic put-the-animals-to-work strategy to take advantage of one particular animal that had evolved not only to move freely around the earth, but to think and trade complicated thoughts. These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn) that incited humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty they would inspire human beings to seed, transport, extol, and even write books about them. [...] That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

Vera’s ideas require a re-thinking of the evidence which has been previously interpreted as showing a dense forest. His view is that the open parkland explains why hazel, pedunculate oak and sessile oak (and other light-demanding species) have been well represented in pollen records for thousands of years, along with that of shade-tolerant species such as limes, elms, ash, common beech and hornbeam. In closed-canopy forests and forest reserves where large gaps are not present, oaks tend gradually to diminish because their seedlings, unlike those of the shade-tolerant trees, cannot grow at the low light levels present in the limited gaps which do form. He also contends that a partial explanation for the very high proportion of tree pollen dating from this period is that grazing may have been so efficient that production of grass pollen per unit area was greatly reduced. Svenning (2002) counters this by pointing out in a review of north-west Europe that in many studies non-tree pollen correlates well with other measures of openness such as beetle, snail and plant macrofossils and concludes that forested conditions were the norm with open vegetation being restricted to floodplains or poor soils (sandy or calcareous) and in the continental interior of north-west Europe.

Change should be slow,” Emlyn replied, glancing at him. “It should allow those who live through it to change alongside. That is the natural way of things. Trees change by the seasons, adapting to the weather, to the rain, sun and snow. Plants bloom, flower, and the bees come to carry pollen from one to another. A sudden, late frost will kill the plants and the bees lose their source of food, dying days later. On and on the ripples of that are felt throughout the land and forest. The Empire was, and still is, that frost.

As any hay-fever sufferer will notice (with a sure degree of horror), ragweed produces so much pollen that it often can be seen leaving the plants in clouds.

Science pretends to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak. The potentials for plants were seen purely through the lens of animal capacity. Until quite recently no one seriously explored the possibility that plants might “speak” to one another. But pollen has been carried reliably on the wind for eons, communicated by males to receptive females to make those very nuts. If the wind can be trusted with that fecund responsibility, why not with messages? The trees are talking to one another. They communicate via pheromones, hormonelike compounds that are wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning.

molecular biologists have learned how to move genetic material between animals and plants, breed crops to resist specific herbicides, or guarantee the sterility of that profligate of pollen,

The plants mature according to the approximate amount of heat they receive, starting from planting. “It all goes by growing degree units, GDUs,” Dave told me. One GDU is added for every degree the average daily temperature exceeds 50°F. So, for example, a day with an average temperature of 65° would be counted as 15 GDUs. “And they know how many GDUs it takes for the female hybrid to get to pollination and how many GDUs it takes for the male to get to pollination, so that nick happens at the same time,” Dave said. “If you put them all in at once, your male could shed pollen before the female has started to silk, and you get no pollination. If that happens—and it has—you can lose a whole crop.” “That’s why weather is such a big deal,” Dave continued.

Most of the rare species seemed to be very fond of clover, particularly red clover, and other wild legumes such as tufted vetch and bird’s-foot trefoil, probably because these plants provide pollen that is unusually rich in protein.

I looked at Internet images of those ice-age lakes in and around Berlin, and their strange German names: Schlachtensee, Wannsee, Müggelsee, Plötzensee. So they call their lake see (sea). And they call their sea meer. Curiously non-English, I thought. This was of course obvious. German is different from English. But still, I realised, I was encountering a third language. This was very different from learning English, because English was always in the atmosphere like pollen from the plants permeating the air, whereas German was like a specific mountain in the landscape which you had to have a particular ambition to climb.