Samuel Thayer > Quotes

“Like many profound and unexamined fears, this one breeds irrationality, causing many people to suspend all logic and refuse to participate in rational discourse.”
― Samuel Thayer, Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

“Yes, twenty million little kids can be wrong. (Barney is not cool.) But in the case of wood sorrel, they're onto something.”
― Samuel Thayer, Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

“Chokeberry gets the award for the worst plant name ever given in the English language. Yes--worse that carrion flower, worse than bastard tad flax, and even worse than broomrape. The problem is not so much that chokeberry sounds bad--although certainly the name is an insult to good fruit. More importantly, the name makes the plant almost impossible to communicate about. The vast majority of people, upon hearing or seeing the word chokeberry, think that they have just heard or read the word chokecherry. (Read carefully; these are two different words.) A typical conversation proceeds like this:
"Another interesting wild fruit is the chokeberry, which is small and black ..."
"Oh yeah, my mom used to make chokecherry jelly. It was great."
"Actually, I said chokeBerries."
"Yeah, chokecherry jelly. Sometimes we'd eat 'em right off the tree."
"I'm not talking about chokecherries; I'm talking about chokeBBBerries."
"I heard you! What do you think I'm talking about?"
On and on it goes.”
― Samuel Thayer, Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants