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" I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground. "

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" 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. "

Hope Jahren

Science

Business

Failure

" I feel like I'm the same scientist I was back when I couldn't get a grant. Now I'm that same person thinking that same way getting grants. That system of external rewards in science has always mystified me. It's fickle. And I also don't think it was constructed with people like me in mind. "

" Plants are decisive to a fault. A stem produces a bud that flowers once and once only. It offers pollen that is either dispersed or goes nowhere. One pollen grain either enters a stigma or it falls upon stony ground. An ovum is either fertilized or the whole project stalls out. "

" 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. "

" My earliest memories are being in the lab, and the way the cement felt and the way it smelled, and the way the countertops looked and it just being this wonderful, warm, happy place where it was just full of toys. "

" The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it's worth interrogating every time we do it. "

" If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world. "

" 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 spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists. "

" The deadnettle is the Punxsutawney Phil of the plant world: short of stature but stout of heart. At the first hint of winter's wane, its stem rises from the ground, and a green, grasping hand of sepals unclenches to divulge two silky-white petals, one of which unfurls straight up toward the sky. "

" A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. "

" My experiences have also convinced me that sexual harassment is very rarely publicly punished after it is reported, and then only after a pattern of relatively egregious offenses. "

Hope Jahren

Experiences

Then

" In our tiny town, my father wasn't a scientist - he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn't his job: it was his identity. "

Hope Jahren

Tiny

Father

" Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft. "

" 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. "

Hope Jahren

Farm

Forest

" My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology. "

" 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. "

Hope Jahren

Tree

You

" I like weeds and hardy plants. "

Hope Jahren

Hardy

Plants

" I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive. "

" 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. "

" My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers. "

" I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything. "

" 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. "

" As an environmental scientist, I think our first need is to feed and shelter and nurture. That has always required the exploitation of plant life, and it always will. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Regardless of what humans do to the climate, there will still be a rock orbiting the sun. "

" 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. "

" Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades. "

" Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. "