Plants are incredibly important. Without our leafy friends, our beautiful planet could not sustain life. In addition to producing oxygen and being an essential part of the water cycle, they’re also vital for other fundamental human needs, including food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. What’s more, of the more than 350,000 named species of plants, fewer than 2% have been tested for medical properties, meaning plants still have massive potential when it comes to contributing to medical breakthroughs.
Beyond the essentials, plants are also simply beautiful, whether they’re towering redwood trees, elegant peace lilies, or peculiar yet fascinating carnivores such as the Venus flytrap. This is one of the reasons why 55% of American households are actively engaged in gardening: Planting a garden adds great aesthetic value to any home, not to mention the therapeutic and health benefits of gardening itself.
Not all of us, however, are blessed with green thumbs. For example, 7 in 10 millennials consider themselves “plant parents” due to owning at least one houseplant, but the average plant owner has killed seven plants they've brought into their home — a sad statistic, but one many of us can relate to.
So in appreciation for our gorgeous green buddies, here are 19 quotes about plants, for both those who love them and those who struggle to keep them alive.
God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.Francis Bacon
Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness.Ralph Waldo Emerson
My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.Mitch Hedberg
A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.Liberty Hyde Bailey
The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.Luther Burbank
There are no happier folk than plant-lovers and none more generous than those who garden.Ernest Henry Wilson
Plants do not speak, but their silence is alive with change.May Sarton
I don't think that you can possibly embrace the kind of joy which one who has worked with plants and plant structures such as I have over a period of nearly 40 years, how wonderful the plant laboratory seems. There is never any end to the story.Percy Lavon Julian
Where flowers bloom, so does hope.Lady Bird Johnson
The plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant — rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance — but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.Roberto Burle Marx
About a month ago I got a cactus. A week later, it died. I was really depressed because I was like, “Damn! I am less nurturing than a desert.”Demetri Martin
I grow plants for many reasons … to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.David Hobson
I just come and talk to the plants, really — very important to talk to them. They respond.King Charles III
Plants are nature’s alchemists, experts at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture.Michael Pollan
If you water it and it dies, it’s a plant. If you pull it out and it grows back, it’s a weed.Gallagher
In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”Robin Wall Kimmerer
We destroy plants at our peril. Neither we nor any other animal can survive without them. The time has now come for us to cherish our green inheritance, not to pillage it.David Attenborough
I can't say this enough: plants, plants, plants. I have an aloe plant, which has been with me for five years now. A beautiful plant is like having a friend around the house.Beth Ditto
Most plants want to grow. Stick ’em in the ground the right way up and the chances are they’ll survive.Monty Don
Featured image credit: BeatrixOjacarcu/ Shutterstock
