Plants

"... corn is the plant of the Americas; it is native to the New World, and corn, more than any other plant, feeds the Americas. At the time of Columbus, corn was cultivated from in Canada to Chile in South America, mostly on forested land that could be cleared by slash-and-burn agriculture followed by several years of fallow. The that replaced the tall grassland of the midcentral United States is a recently developed (ca. 150 years) corn-producing region with its own landrace, . The United States produces 40% of the world's corn harvest, and it takes 25 corn plants per person per day to support the American way of life. This plant is found in more than the on the breakfast table. is in the margarine, corn syrup sweeteners in the marmalade, corn syrup solids in the instant nondairy coffee creamer, and corn was fed to the cows that made the milk, the chickens that laid the eggs, and the pigs that produced the bacon."

"... From the more than 200 million metric tons of corn that the United States produces each year, 85 percent is converted into cows, hogs and chickens in the proportion of 60 millions cows, 100 million hogs and 4 billion chickens. As an index of corn's super conversion powers (double those of wheat), one bushel of corn in a mixed feed bag translated into 15 pounds of retail beef, 26 pounds of pork and 37 pounds of poultry. And this is still corn in a form we can recognize: fodder, silage, shelled grains or fibrous by-products."

"... The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn. Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the and the , the and the and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. ... ... Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find."

"The biological origin, diversification, and domestication of maize occurred in Mesoamerica, located in the center of Mexico. This grass of the Poaceae family had a seminal role in the origin, extension of agriculture, and culture of pre-Hispanic civilizations (Smith et al., 1981). One of the species of actual s, Zea mays subsp. parviglumis, is the progenitor of all derivative Zea mays subsp. mays modern races. The human-driven domestication that started around 9,000 years ago is one of the most critical events in the history of agriculture (Doebley, 2004; Piperno et al., 2009; Sahoo et al., 2021)."

"Orrum et caepe nefas violare et frangere morsu; o sanctas gentes quibus haec nascuntur in hortis numina!"

"Wel loved he garleek, oynons, and eek lekes."

"We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes."

"Among us there are two principal varieties known of the onion; the scallion, employed for seasonings, is one, known to the Greeks by the name of gethyon, and by us as the pallacana; it is sown in March, April, and May. The other kind is the bulbed or headed onion; it is sown just after the autumnal equinox, or else after the west winds have begun to prevail. The varieties of this last kind, ranged according to their relative degrees of pungency, are the African onion, the Gallic, the Tusculan, the Ascalonian, and the Amiternian: the roundest in shape are the best. The red onion, too, is more pungent than the white, the stored than the fresh, the raw than the cooked, and the dried than the preserved."

"And if the boy have not a woman’s gift To rain a shower of commanded tears, An onion will do well for such a shift, Which, in a napkin being close convey’d, Shall in despite enforce a watery eye."

"And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlick, for we are to utter sweet breath."

"Whoever has tasted onions in Egypt must allow that none can be had better in any other part of the universe: here they are sweet; in other countries they are nauseous and strong. They eat them roasted, cut into four pieces, with some bits of roasted meat which the Turks in Egypt call kebab; and with this dish they are so delighted that I have heard them wish they might enjoy it in Paradise. They likewise make a soup of them."

"The tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow."

"Shrek: Ogres are like onions! Donkey: They stink? Shrek: No! Donkey: Oh, they make you cry? Shrek: No! Donkey: Oh, you leave 'em out in the sun and they start turnin' brown and start sproutin' little white hairs... Shrek: No! Layers! Onions have layers. Ogres have layers..."

"Look, they weep, And I, an ass, am onion-eyed."

"Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon."

"Ready to take Rats-bane for Sugar, Hemlock for Parsly, and the Berries of deadly Night-shade for Cherries."

"Night-shade is very dangerous of what sort soever it be, taken either in the Roote, Hearb, or Fruit; All the kinds excite and provoke to sleepe; The Ordinary and Common Night-shade is lesse pernitious: And those which are called Hortensis, and Belladonna, are the most poysonous and mortall, especially their Fruits; Causing terrible Dreames, strange Phansies, Alienation of the Mind, deepe sleepe, &c."

"I may assure your correspondents, by my own personal testimony, that the plant growing in , from which, but but probably erroneously, the valley in which it stands is said to have taken its former name, is the true “deadly nightshade,” Atropa belladonna. The other plant known as “nightshade,” and sometimes called “deadly nightshade,” ', probably grows there also. It is a very common plant, to be found in all parts of England. But the Atropa grows among the ruins in some abundance, and on my last visit I gathered it in full fruit, its glossy dark purple berries, in shape and colour not unlike a blackheart cherry and with a sweetness of taste by no means disagreeable, presenting a fatal attraction to the ignorant or unwary."

"BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."

"Stinking’st of the stinking kind, Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind, Africa, that brags her foyson, Breeds no such prodigious poison, Henbane, nightshade, both together, Hemlock, aconite—"

"Bring out the hemlock! bring the funeral yew! The faithful ivy that doth all enfold; Heap high the rocks, the patient brown earth strew, And cover them against the numbing cold."

"He lookèd from his loft one day To where his slighted garden lay; Nettles and hemlock hid each lawn, And every flower was starved and gone."

"The grass, forerunner of life, has gone, But plants that spring in ruins and shards Attend until your dream is done: I have seen hemlock in your yards."

"CORDELIA [on her father]: Alack, 'tis he: why, he was met even now As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud; Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn. ..."

"O Gods! that ever anie thing so sweete, So suddenlie should fade awaie, and fleete! Hir armes are spread, and I am all unarm’d, Lyke one with Ovid’s cursed hemlocke charm’d;"

"Stinking’st of the stinking kind, Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind, Africa, that brags her foyson, Breeds no such prodigious poison, Henbane, nightshade, both together, Hemlock, aconite—"

"THIRD WITCH: Root of hemlock digged i’the dark,"

"And bring me the flag that is moist with the wave, And the rush where the heath-winds sigh, And the hemlock plant, that flourishes so brave, And the poppy, with its coal-black eye;And weave them tightly, and weave them well, The fever of my head to allay;— And soon shall I faint with the death-weed smell, And sleep these throbbings away."

"Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle; Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay; In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle Have choked up the rose which late bloom’d in the way."

"No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;"

"Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations."

"BURGUNDY [lamenting the neglect of France]: Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart, Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleach'd, Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair, Put forth disorder'd twigs; her fallow leas The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts That should deracinate such savagery;"

"BANQUO [perhaps describing hemlock or ]: Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root That takes the reason prisoner?"

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:"

"And eagerly she kist me with her tongue, And under mine her wanton thigh she flung. Yea, and she soothd me up, and calld me sire, And usde all speech that might provoke, and stirre. Yet like as if cold Hemlock I had drunke, It mocked me, hung downe the head, and sunke."

"But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways."

"A rolling stone gathers no moss.."

"My will is easy to decide, For there is nothing to divide. My kin don’t need to fuss and moan — "Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.""

"Put a mossy stone, With mortal name and date, a harp And bunch of wild flowers, carven sharp; Then leave it free to winds that blow, And patient mosses creeping; slow, And wandering wings, and footsteps rare Of human creature pausing there."

"As it stands, it's the monster from hell, about which nobody knows what to do."

"A path scented with sweetgrass leads to a landscape of forgiveness and healing for all who need it."

"Sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion."

"Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten."

"The origin of plant life upon the Bermudas, is a question not very difficult of solution, after a careful consideration of facts accruing from the continued observations of several years. The islands are greatly influenced by the current of the Gulf Stream, which brings to their shores numberless objects, animate and inanimate, from the Caribbean Sea. Among such we may instances the seeds of trees, shrubs and plants, which are continually being cast ashore; while the occurrence of several forms, even forest trees, just above high water mark, go far to prove their drift origin. The hard seeds of the Leguminosæ seem especially adapted to withstand immersion in salt water for a length of time, and the fact of this order being better represented than any other favours the presumption. But although several leguminous seeds germinate on the Bermudas, there are some commonly cast ashore which do not; such are the seeds of Entada scandens, and Mucuna urens, which have never yet grown on the islands, notwithstanding their seeds are frequently landed near the trailing stems of Canavalia obtusifolia. Probably the sandy soil of the beach is unsuited to these species, which appear to grow on river banks in the West Indian Islands."

"Drift seeds bob down rivers or cross oceans — I have a dark brown Sea Heart on my desk at the Institute. I picked it up on a beach near Durban, far from the tropical Americas where it might have begun. I've rubbed it like a giant worry bead, glossed its brown skin thinking about its adventures on the currents — Gulf Stream, Equatorial, Canary, Brazil, Atlantic, Benguela, somehow making its way around Africa's tip and up to the tropical sands of KwaZulu-Natal."

"According to Guppy the type of Mucuna seed that is most frequently gathered on the beaches of Western Europe is that provisionally referred by him to Mucuna "near urens" and since suggested to be Mucuna altissimo. A drift seed of this was picked up by Guppy on the beach at Salcombe in Devon. In this the seeds are described as slightly flatter or more depressed than in M. urens and rather over and inch in diameter. They possess a narrower but a similarly encircling raphe. In color they are usually of a dark brown and when of a lighter hue they display black mottlings. Another drift seed, found at St. Helens in the Isle of Wight, is in the Kew Museum. Similar seeds have occurred in the Faroe and the Shetland Islands."

"Darwin himself did some simple yet elegant experiments showing that seeds from some plant species could still germinate after prolonged immersion in seawater. Seeds from the West Indies have been found on the distant shores of Scotland, obviously carried by the Gulf Stream, and "drift seeds" from continents or other islands are also found on the shores of the South Pacific islands."

"Plants have been explored for many years as inexpensive and versatile platforms for the generation of vaccines and other biopharmaceuticals. Plant viruses have also been engineered to either express subunit vaccines or act as epitope presentation systems. Both icosahedral and helical, filamentous-shaped plant viruses have been used for these purposes. More recently, plant viruses have been utilized as nanoparticles to transport drugs and active molecules into cancer cells. The following review describes the use of both icosahedral and helical plant viruses in a variety of new functions against cancer."

"The discovery of the first non-cellular infectious agent, later determined to be tobacco mosaic virus, paved the way for the field of virology. In the ensuing decades, research focused on discovering and eliminating viral threats to plant and animal health. However, recent conceptual and methodological revolutions have made it clear that viruses are not merely agents of destruction but essential components of global ecosystems. As plants make up over 80% of the biomass on Earth, plant viruses likely have a larger impact on ecosystem stability and function than viruses of other kingdoms. Besides preventing overgrowth of genetically homogeneous plant populations such as crop plants, some plant viruses might also promote the adaptation of their hosts to changing environments. However, estimates of the extent and frequencies of such mutualistic interactions remain controversial."

"The interest in plant virus evolution can be dated to the late 1920s, when it was shown that plant virus populations were genetically heterogeneous, and that their composition changed according to the experimental conditions. Many important ideas were generated prior to the era of molecular virology, such as the role of hostand vector-associated selection in virus evolution, and also that small populations, gene coadaptation and evolutionary trade-offs could limit the efficiency of selection. The analysis of viral genomes in the 1980s and 1990s established the quasispecieslike structure of their populations and allowed extensive analyses of the relationships among virus strains and species. The concept that virus populations had huge sizes and high rates of adaptive mutations became prevalent in this period, with selection mostly invoked as explaining observed patterns of population structure and evolution. In recent times virus evolution has been coming into line with evolutionary biology, and a more complex scenario has emerged."