Botany

"Not only is eating invasive species a solution, but we’re taking pressure off the food system, saving resources. Japanese knotweed is incredible, it’s like a mix of asparagus and rhubarb."

"For centuries, botany has been closely linked to medicine, because plants provide the raw materials for many lotions and drugs. For example, , one of the most widely used drugs in the world, was originally derived from the bark of a tree, after the bark had been known for centuries to have anti-inflammatory properties. s describing curative plants enabled knowledge to pass from one generation to the next, although many of the earliest books would have been of little use as s. The ... shows how far illustrations could deviate, delightfully, from the text, and many plants described in classical scholarship are not found beyond the Mediterranean. Around the end of the 14th century artists began to make new, fresh, and direct observations from life. Especially fine examples are seen among the pages of the Carrara Herbal."

"My mother carefully fostered a liking for botany, giving me a small microscope and many books, which I yet have. Strange as it may seem, I now believe that botany and the natural system, by exercising discrimination of kinds, is the best of logical exercises. What I may do in logic is perhaps derived from that early attention to botany."

"Alchemy does not mix or compound anything, it causes that which already exists in a latent state to become active and grow. Alchemy is, therefore, more comparable to botany or agriculture than to Chemistry; and, in fact, the growth of a plant, a tree, or an animal is an alchemical process going on in the alchemical laboratory of nature, and performed by the great Alchemist, the power of God acting in nature."