How lucky country children are in these natural delights that lie ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their diversion. The seedpods of stitchwort hang ready for delightful popping between thumb and finger, and later the bladder campion offers a larger, if less crisp, globe to burst. In the autumn, acorns, beechnuts, and conkers bedizen their path, with all their manifold possibilities of fun. In the summer, there is an assortment of honeys to be sucked from bindweed flowers, held fragile and fragrant to hungry lips, and the tiny funnels of honeysuckle and clover blossoms to taste. Miss Read, Village Diary
It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don't suppose anybody really understands yet. Jane Goodall
A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And clothed them beneath the kisses of night. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, 1820
I just come and talk to the plants, really – very important to talk to them: they respond I find. Prince Charles
After the coffin came life after 2,100 years. The Chinese archaeologists were cracking open a tomb ... Beside the Mummy that they brought out were containers of ancient seeds ... The shock came: still alive after 2,100 years there were 40 seeds that sprouted into tomato plants. Jonathan Gray, interview Coast to Coast Hidden Discoveries
Plants: we’d be toast without them ... The plants are softly breathing. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos VI: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still, National Geographic 2014
The sound can only be described as other worldly but the source is as commonplace as the ground we walk on, the air we breathe. The sound comes from plants … some call it ‘a voice’ … The astonishing possibility that plants can communicate. In Search of s1e1 … Other Voices, 1977
Do plants feel? ibid.
The creosote bush … One plant is known to have survived for over 11,000 years. It’s brilliant at coping with drought. Mexico: Earth’s Festival of Life III: Burning North, BBC 2017
Once upon a time there was a tiny neglected plant. A plant capable of working wonders. An ingenious and resilient plant … It grows everywhere on the planet. The Magical World of Moss, BBC 2023
Mosses are essential to life on Earth and they have been shaping our planet since the dawn of time. ibid.
Iceland: ‘Mosses have no roots. They are capable of absorbing nutriments directly thanks to their membranes.’ ibid.
We have discovered close to 25,000 species. ibid.
Mosses can also auto-regenerate from a piece of stem or a damaged leaf. ibid.
Plants rose from the oceans to conquer a hostile and alien land, fighting and evolving through triumph and disaster. Chris Packham, Earth III: Green
The story of plants begins deep in Earth’s ancient history four billion years ago when the planet was an inhospitable world. ibid.
Fungi and plants had come together to produce the first complex terrestrial ecosystem. ibid.
Leaves did far more than just allow plants to harvest more carbon dioxide; they made photosynthesis more efficient which boosted energy. ibid.
It’s like an underground world filled with magical plants that bring nothing but righteousness and can help everyone feel so much better. And it’s all been outlawed by Babylon. The Gentlemen IV: An Unsympathetic Gentleman, Jimmy to girlfriend, Netflix 2024