Botanical illustrator Quotes

“I adore the elegance of botanical realism but I also can't help but dream of my very own neo-surrealistic fantasy flowers, and so I paint and illustrate both; I always find myself between both of those worlds.”

“To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.”

“Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.”

“I ran from them. Nights, yellow lights scoured sand. What was ever found but women in skirts folded around the men they loved that Friday? No one found me. And how could that have been, here, whereeven botanical names were recordedand small roads mapped in red?Night, the sky is black paper pecked with pinholes.”

“Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need - not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment.”

“She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it.”

“The infinitesimal seedlings became a forest of trees that grew courteously, correcting the distances between themselves as they shaped themselves to the promptings of available light and moisture, tempering the climate and the temperaments of the Scots, as the driest land became moist and the wettest land became dry, seedlings finding a mean between extremes, and the trees constructing a moderate zone for themselves even into what I would have called tundra, until I understood the fact that Aristotle taught, while walking in a botanic garden, that the middle is fittest to discern the extremes. ("Interim")”

“Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.”

“Night is the worst time. After the long regimentation of the day, the enforced silences, the men want to talk. At first it doesn’t matter what about: TV, movies, travel, jobs. I lie on my side on my mattress as the words pool around me, reciting to myself the botanical classifications for peach, cherry, apple. Magnoliophyta, Magnoliopsida, Rosales, Rosaceae… I smell the smell of other bodies: stale skin, flatulence, cologne. I long to open the windows and let the fresh air sweep the smells away, sweep the bodies away too. Gradually one man drops out of the conversation, then another. Soon there will be only two men left speaking. And these two—they are not the same two every night—will drop their voices, speak in an intimate murmur. Perhaps they are only gossiping about one of the monks. Perhaps they are complaining about the food. But no, there is a reticence that lets me know that they are trying, clumsily, to reach each other.”

“Flowers are conscious, intelligent forces. They have been given to us for our happiness and our healing.We can hasten our own evolution by through employing the tools offered to us by a conscious, caring Mother Nature—flowers and their essences.Flower essences allow us to see into the soul of things—into ourselves, our world, and all living beings.Flower essences are a response to the call of an ever-awakening humanity to minister to its spiritual needs.Mother Nature’s pharmacy has long been accessible to those who have pried open her botanical medicine chest. And to those who wish to learn her language—the language of flowers—she bestows her most wonderful secrets of perfect well-being.In keeping with herbalism’s ancient tradition of communing with the plant kingdom, flower essences have evolved as a natural expression of healing—in the simplest ways, through the simplest means.(The) principle of magnetism is strongly operative in flower essences that vibrationally align us with the positive qualities that we seek to uncover within ourselves.How, then, do flower essences work? Very well indeed.”