A tree's wood is also its memoir.
Hope Jahren
The world is a fickle place, and it's not fair. But if you're getting most of your rewards from you, then you can use that as a kind of compass, and you can be secure in the fact that you're working for the right reason, and you're going in the right direction.
Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.
People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it's because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.
You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.
You can't drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It's where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain or fed to you as syrup or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank.
I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.
A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.
There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners.
America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it.
A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits.
I think, as you move to the upper ranks of science - ranks being positions of influence and access - you see fewer female faces. And I think the basic reason is the same reason that you don't see a lot of female faces in Congress or on the Supreme Court or on the directing board of Fortune 500 companies.
If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.
I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby.
I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.
I was a promising graduate student. I landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation. While I prepared to start my new job, I decided that I would begin by studying the brine that bleeds sideways within the rocks that underlie the inner Aegean region of Turkey.
Women live in a world where we are forced to consider our safety at every turn. We minimize risk while we maximize activity. It's this constant balancing act that we do.
Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.
In New England, the pin oak thrives, its leaves tipping to a thorny point in a good-natured impression of its evergreen neighbor, the holly bush.
We have to be very careful about acknowledging that the Internet is very good at combatting isolation, but it's not very good at delivering justice.
Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning.
It's very important to put children in an environment where they can take things apart; where they can break things and then learn to fix them; where they can trust their hands and know their capacity to manipulate objects.
I think it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they've spent a big chunk of their childhood or they're growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.
I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.
I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.
We must feed, shelter, and nurture one another as our first priority, and to do so, we must avail ourselves of our best technologies, which have always included some type of genetic modification.
My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.
When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch.
What is a berry? It is an ovary swaddled within a sugary womb. Plainly put, a berry is the fruition of a flower - the ultimate tautology.
Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable.
While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.
I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.
The type of science that I do is sometimes known as 'curiosity-driven research.' This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.
I think the best learning is done with active manipulation. And we need to be able to work with our hands; it's not just about using our brains.
Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft.
Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you've had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate.
My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me.
I can explain to you in detail just how a tree can be made into paper. But I've always wondered - and hoped - that someday, someone would help me discover how paper can be made back into a tree.
The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass.
I love to read stories. And I don't to get to talk about my favorite novels very often in my job.
I like weeds and hardy plants.
Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.
I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.
Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won't take long. She'll look you in the eye and say one word: 'Money.'
The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes.
We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.
I grew up in a time when there were very few women in the physical sciences. And people started to ask me, 'How did you decide to become a scientist?' And I couldn't really answer. I always knew I'd grow up to have a lab because my dad had one.
I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.
I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.
Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.
