Amy Stewart > Quotes

“But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you're left with, at the end of the day, is this: a stretch of freshly turned dirt, a handful of seeds scratched into the surface, and a marker to remember where they went. It is at the same time an incredibly brave and an incredibly simple thing to do, entrusting your seeds to the earth and waiting for them to rise up out of the ground to meet you.”
― Amy Stewart, From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden

“People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite.”
― Amy Stewart, The Last Bookstore in America

“The male doesn't eat - it doesn't even have a mouth or an anus - so it does nothing but mate until death.”
― Amy Stewart, Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army and Other Diabolical Insects

“A poisonous seed will only kill you if you chew it and swallow.”
― Amy Stewart, Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities

“It didn’t help that Norma had all the girlish charm of a boulder”
― Amy Stewart, Girl Waits with Gun

“Gardeners are the ultimate mixologists.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

“Eternity can be found in the minuscule, in the place where earthworms, along with billions of unseen soil-dwelling microorganisms, engage in a complex and little-understood dance with the tangle of plant roots that make up their gardens, their cities.”
― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

“Perhaps it makes sense that a creature that doesn't get ill and has few enemies among its neighbors would also live agelessly and die without explanation or cause--would simply vanish without a trace.”
― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

“I’d always felt that one could read a woman’s discontent in the amount of embroidery in her sitting room. It gave me a crowded and nervous feeling to sit among so much frantic stitchery.”
― Amy Stewart, Lady Cop Makes Trouble

“The rat population thrived in such a horrible mess. Ironically, cats were believed to be the consorts of witches in those days, so they were killed. Persecution of cats during the Middle Ages nearly eliminated populations of the rat's natural predator, just when Europeans could have used the cats' hunting skills the most.”
― Amy Stewart, Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army and Other Diabolical Insects

“Drunken botanists? Given the role they play in creating the world’s great drinks, it’s a wonder there are any sober botanists at all.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better.”
― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

“Some growers believe that a particular type of music makes the plants grow faster, but most agree that the best strategy for the plants is to play whatever music the workers like best.”
― Amy Stewart, Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers

“Any environment, any single life is in a continuous state of change. This is just more obvious when you pay attention to earthworms. Their work may seem unspectacular at first. They don't chirp or sing, they don't gallop or soar, they don't hunt or make tools or write books. But they do something just as powerful: they consume, they transform, they change the earth.”
― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

“But a male tree produces only small, well-behaved flowers—that is, if your definition of well behaved includes spewing plant sperm into the air for weeks on end.”
― Amy Stewart, Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities

“The vanilla bean is the fruit of a species of orchid native to southeastern Mexico, and it is unusually difficult to cultivate. Like most orchids, it is an epiphyte, meaning that its roots need to be exposed to air, not soil. It climbs the trunks of trees, thriving in limbs a hundred feet aboveground, and unfurls just one flower per day over a two-month period, awaiting pollination by a single species of tiny stingless bee, Melipona beecheii. If the flower is pollinated, a pod develops over the next six to eight months. And although the pods contain thousands of tiny seeds, they are incapable of germinating unless they are in the presence of a particular mycorrhizal fungus.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“During Prohibition, enterprising California grape growers kept themselves in business by selling “fruit bricks”—blocks of dried, compressed grapes that were packaged with wine-making yeast. A label warned purchasers not to dissolve the fruit brick in warm water and add the yeast packet, as this would result in fermentation and the creation of alcohol, which was illegal.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“Never had a larger committee been convened to make a decision about the purchase of mustard powder and the replacement of a claw hammer whose handle had split from age and misuse.”
― Amy Stewart, Girl Waits With Gun

“Perfume makers know that, owing to genetic differences in how we experience fragrances, about half the people who inhale jasmine will think of honey, and the other half, unfortunately, will think of urine. They’re both right.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“American farmers were still trying to figure out how to make good wine from native American grapes. The difficulty had to do with the genetics of the grape itself. While the European V. vinifera enjoyed almost ten thousand years of selection by humans, who chose larger, tastier fruit and favored hermaphrodite vines over dioecious vines, very little human selection seems to have taken place in North America. Instead, the birds did it. They selectively picked blue-skinned varieties, an unattractive color for wine, because they could see them better—and they chose small fruit over large because they could eat it in one bite.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“I would’ve never guessed that a life in law enforcement was mostly spent waiting, that catching criminals requires not just clever thinking and a quick step, but a willingness to stand still while the rest of the world moves about, and that what was required was not strength or grit but the ability to get into place and stay there, and to ignore the desperate rising certainty that something more urgent might be happening, somewhere, and that if only one could leave one’s post and tear down the street in pursuit, some kind of prey would surely leap up and allow itself to be caught.”
― Amy Stewart, Lady Cop Makes Trouble

“Epigraph
“I got a revolver to protect us.” said Miss Constance,
”and I soon had use for it.”
--New York Times, June 3 1915”
― Amy Stewart

“give her one silent gift from a mother she didn’t know she had—it would be this: the realization that we have to be a part of the world in which we live. We don’t scurry away when we’re in trouble, or when someone else is. We don’t run and hide.”
― Amy Stewart, Girl Waits with Gun

“In 1897, a Scientific American reporter wrote that “mezcal is described as tasting like a mixture of gasoline, gin and electricity. Tequila is even worse, and is said to incite murder, riot and revolution.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“If bacteria can be pictured as teeming black ants under the microscope, imagine fungi as gossamer spider webs. These organisms form long threads called hyphae that stretch between plant roots. Some form into even larger masses called mycelium that can span an entire backyard.”
― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

“Fermentation takes place in open tanks by necessity; otherwise, the pressure from the carbon dioxide would build to dangerous levels. But when a vat of fruit juice or grain mash is left to brew in an old barn or warehouse, bugs will surely find their way in. This is not always such a bad thing: lambic brewers in Brussels realize that some of their best strains of yeast come from insects falling from the rafters. In fact, yeast produce esters in order to attract insects, hoping they will pick up the yeast and move it around. This makes bugs unwitting accomplices in the dance between sugar and yeast.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

“A jalapeño pepper—generally considered to be the hottest pepper any sane person would attempt to chew and swallow—gets a rating of around 5,000 SHU.”
― Amy Stewart, Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities

“Where the years ahead had once seemed vague and unknowable, amorphous in shape and indeterminable in size, after my mother died I began to see a set of decades stacked neatly in front of me like bricks...When I allowed myself to think of the brevity of the time ahead of me, and the futility of spending any more of it on cooking and mending and gardening, it frightened me so much that I almost couldn't breathe.”
― Amy Stewart

“Mango and cashew trees also produce the irritating resin known as urishol, as does the lacquer tree. In fact, people who are highly sensitive to poison ivy or one of its cousins may experience a cross-sensitivity to mango rind or a lacquer-covered box.”
― Amy Stewart, Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities

“The Aztec Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, one of the few pre-Columbian books not destroyed by the Spanish, portray Mayahuel, goddess of the agave, breast-feeding her drunken rabbit children, presumably offering them pulque instead of milk.”
― Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks