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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn's skin. "

" 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. "

" I am a scientist. To be specific, I am a woman scientist. This, I have been told and have come to believe, is a good thing. In fact, it is such a good thing that America needs more of us. Everyone seems to be very sure of this. The thing that no one is sure about, however, is how to make it happen. "

" 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. "

" I'm a scientist - a geobiologist who's been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized that I wanted, needed, to tell people - and not just other scientists - about my life in science. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 have learned that nothing gets readers so fired up as saying something everyone knows is true. "

" For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months. "

" Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world. "

" A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet. "

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

" I like weeds and hardy plants. "

" 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. "

" Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think being a scientist is a position of respect and power and access, and it's a privileged position in society. And I think there are fundamental mechanisms that keep men and women from achieving the same level of power and access and privilege in society. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy. "

" My life is pretty small. Even as a successful scientist, I'm not a public figure. I like people - I just don't know that many! "

" 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. "

" My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me. "

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

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