Complexity

Diversity, Multiplicity, Biodiversity 
Variety, Systems, Divergence, Chaos


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Compiled by Mike Garofalo

Quotations for Gardeners, Walkers, and Lovers of the Green Way
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California


"Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex."
-  M. Scott Peck  

 

"The little things?  The little moments?  They aren't little."
- John Zabat-Zinn  

 

"We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time:  How much is enough?"
-  Wendell Berry  

 

"A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be."
-  Fritjof Capra  

 

"A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.  Unthinkable complexity.  Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.  Like city lights, receding."
- William Gibson 

 

"A garden is like the self.  It has so many layers and winding paths, real or imagined, that  it can never be known, completely, every by the most intimate of friends."
-  Anne Raver, Deep in the Green  

 

"Show me a person without prejudice of any kind on any subject and I'll show you someone who may be admirably virtuous but is surely no gardener.   Prejudice against people is reprehensible, but a healthy set of prejudices is a gardener's best friend.  Gardening is complicated, and prejudice simplifies it enormously."
-  Allen Lacy, Home Ground, 1984  

 

"I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen."
-  Jerry Brown  

 

"It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged."
-  Vita Sackville West  

 

"Biological diversity is being lost at a rate unequalled since the appearance of modern ecosystems more than 40 million years ago.  A quarter of all mammals are threatened with extinction; and nearly 70% of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted."
-  Royal Society 

 

"A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exit in nature.  Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots.  Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature.  The eye sees noun and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things."
-   Ernest Fenollosa  

 

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop  
Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell 
Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven Strogatz 
Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory by Neil Johnson  
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert L. Barabasi 

 

                             

 

 

"Probe the universe in a myriad of points. ...  He is a wise man who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad of objects have each suggesting something, contributed something."
-  Henry David Thoreau, Journals 1951  

 

"Because a garden mean constantly making choices, it offers almost limitless possibilities for surprise and satisfaction."
-  Jane Garmey, The Writer in the Garden 

 

"A monk asked Zen master Yunju Daoying, "What is the one Dharma?"
Yunju said, "What are the ten thousand Dharmas?"
The monk said, "I don't understand how to comprehend this."
Yunju said, "The one Dharma is your own mind.  The ten thousand dharmas are your fundamental nature.  Are they one thing or two?"
The monk bowed.
Yunju showed the monk a poem that said:
The single Dharma is the essence of all dharmas,
The myriad dharmas penetrate the one Dharma.
"Mind-only: and "nature-only,"
Don't say they're different or the same."
-  "Zen's Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings" by Andy Ferguson, Wisdom Publications, 2000, p. 212.  

 

"The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression."
-   Eugene Wigner  

 

"Existence consist in the interplay of a plurality of elements whose true nature is indescribable and whose source is unknown.  Combinations of these elements instantaneously flash into existence and instantaneously disappear, to be succeeded by new combinations of elements appearing in a strict causality."
-   Earle Ernst, The Kabuki Theatre  

 

"To make progress in understanding all this, we probably need to begin with simplified (oversimplified?) models and ignore the critics' tirade that the real world is more complex.  The real world is always more complex, which has the advantage that we shan't run out of work."
-  John Ball, 1984, Memes as Replicators, Ethology and Sociobiology, Vol. 5

 

"That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.  That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.  But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption.  If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.  My life consists in my being content to accept many things."
-  Ludwig Wittgenstein,
On Certainty, 1969, Sections: 341-344.  Professor Wittgenstein' last writings in 1950. 

 

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."
-  Benoit Mandelbrot  

 

"Gardening is about being grounded, rooted to the here and now with the need to tidy up.  It is the difference between managing life and entering into life, reminding us that gardening need not be the fraught, perfectionistic, slightly paranoid struggle that it becomes for some.  Truth is, our love of plants is bound up with a taste for human error, nature's excesses, and sheer unadulterated indulgence."
-  Terry Hershey, Soul Gardening 

 

"Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex."
-  Oscar Wilde 

 

"Scientists know we must protect species because they are working parts of our life-support system."
-  Paul Ehrlich

 

"How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening."
-  Alexander Smith  

 

"An agricultural adage says the tiny animals that live below the surface of a healthy pasture weigh more than the cows grazing above it.   In a catalogue selling composting equipment I read that two handfuls of healthy soil contain more living organisms than there are people on the earth.  What these beings are and what they can be doing is difficult to even begin to comprehend, but it helps to realize that even thought they are many, they work as one."
-  Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life  

 

"Nature goes her own way and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order."
-  Goethe   

 

"Making simple matters complex or complex matters simple are both bad gardening techniques.
Simplifying our relations to things sometimes allows us to live more complex intellectual and emotional lives.
Repetition and diversification are Nature's formulas. 
Simplifying and simplicity are never simple matters.  
The empty garden is already full.    
The happiest gardeners have simply learned how to relax.  
The simplest garden is never simple. 
It takes four seasons to know one year.
Complexity is closer to the Truth. 
Diversity, multiplicity, relations, combinations, mixtures, complexity - rarely just one process or one thing. 
Location, location, location ... is also true for plants.
Never just One: fruit, a hoe, the moving Sun."  
-  Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions  

 

Biodiversity: An Introduction by Kevin Gaston 
The Diversity of Life (Questions of Science) by Edward O. Wilson  
Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela 
Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity by Eric Chivian
Plant Diversity (The Green World) by Andrew Hipp
Demons in Eden: The Paradox of Plant Diversity by Johathan Silvertown

 

                                  

 

 

"Plurality should not be assumed without necessity."
-  William of Ockham  

 

"Nature abhors a vacuity
Especially in perpetuity
She finds her felicity
In asymmetricity
And notices no incongruity."
Jim Clatfelter

 

"The motto of science is not just Pauca but rather Plurima ex paucissimis - the most out of the least."
-  M. Bunge, The Myth of Simplicity, 1963

 

"The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many."
-  Joseph Wood Krutch  

 

   

 

"What is important is that complex systems, richly cross-connected internally, have complex behaviours, and that these behaviours can be goal-seeking in complex patterns."
-  W. Ross Ashby  

 

"Unity is plural and, at a minimum, is two."
-  R. Buckminster Fuller  

 

"Every time we lose a species webreak a life chain which has evolved over 3.5 billion years."
-  Jeffrey McNeely  

 

"For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria."
-  Richard Dawkins  

 

"Biodiversity is the greatest treasure we have.  Its diminishment is to be prevented at all cost."
-  Thomas Eisner

 

"Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple.  The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves."
-  Herbert Simon 

 

"O Marvelous!  What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity."
-  William Carlos Williams, At Dawn, 1914  

 

"Each one of the Earth's 5 million invertebrate species plays a role in its ecosystem.  It's like we're tearing the cogs out of a great machine.  The machine might work after you tear out ten cogs, but what happens when you tear out a hundred?"
-  Scott Black 

 

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun 
Secrets to Great Soil (Gardening Skills Illustrated) by Elizabeth Stell 
Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web by Jeff Lowenfels 
Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners by James Nardi 
Soil (True Books: Natural Resources) by Christin Ditchfield 
Soil Science Simplified by Helmut Kohnke 
Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan 

 

                                 

 

 

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
-  Aldo Leopold 

 

"Life is a banquet, and most fools are starving to death."  

 

Orlog
The Norns' Chant

"In the midst of darkness, light;
In the midst of death, life;
In the midst of chaos, order.
In the midst of order, chaos;
In the midst of life, death;
In the midst of light, darkness.
Thus has it ever been,
Thus is it now, and
Thus shall it always be."
Ancient Nordic Spirituality  

 

How to Support this Website

 

"Use what talent you possess.   The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."
-  Henry Van Dyke  

 

"Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes.  But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond."
-  Leibniz  

 

"Every explicit duality is an implicit unity."
-  Alan Watts  

 

"Everything is complex and everything is simple.  The rose has no why attached to it, it blooms because it blooms, how no thought of itself, or desire to be seen.  What could be more complicated than a rose for someone who wants to understand it?  What could be simpler for someone who wants nothing?  The complexity of thinking, the simplicity of beholding."
-  Andre Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues 

 

"Nothing can be created out of nothing.
"Nil posse creari De nilo."
-  Lucretius,  99-55 B.C.

 

"The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence."
-  Gregory Bateson  

 

The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading: An Encyclopedia of Independent Living by Nichole Faires  
Homesteading: A Back to Basics Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More by Abigail Gehring  
The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! by Carleen Madigan 
Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Bret Markham  
Just in Case: How to be Self-Sufficient when the Unexpected Happens by Kathy Harrison 

 

                             

 

 

"Part of the problem today is that we have a surplus of simple answers and a shortage of simple problems."
-  Syracuse Herald  

 

"The number of people displaced by dams is estimated at between 40 million and 80 million, most of them in China and India. The costs of dams were on average 50% above their original estimate. Some designed to reduce flooding made it worse, and there were many unexpected environmental disadvantages, including the extinction of fish and bird species. Half the world's wetlands had been lost because of dams."
-  Paul Brown 

 

"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal."
-  Thomas Jefferson

 

"If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line
As a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms
And plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases
Of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter
Of a transcendental kind."
-  W.S. Gilbert, Bunthorne's Song from Patience   

 

"To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts.  To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole.  Such is the circle of understanding."
-  Ken Wilber, Eye of Spirit  

 

"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds."
-  George Santayana  

 

"Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough, but not baked in the same oven."
-  Yiddish Proverb   

 

"We struggle with the complexities and avoid the simplicities."
-  Norman Vincent Peale  

 

"How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing -
each stone, blossom, child -
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly."
-  Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, II, 16
   Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

 

 

"May you have warm words on a cold evening,
A full moon on a dark night,
And the road downhill all the way to your door."
-  Irish Saying  

 

 

  
Months and Seasons
Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Verses, Lore, Myths, Holidays
Celebrations, Folklore, Reading, Links, Quotations
Information, Weather, Gardening Chores
Complied by Mike Garofalo
 
Winter Spring Summer Fall
January April July October
February May August November
March June September December 

 

 

"Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society."
-  Alfred Austin  

 

"We live in a rainbow of chaos."
-  Paul Cezanne  

 

The Three Laws of Ecology:
First Law:  All forms of life are interdependent and interrelated. 
When one is disturbed or harmed, all are disturbed or harmed.
Second Law:  The stability of ecosystems is dependent upon their diversity.
Greater diversity means more stability. 
Eliminating some life forms reduces stability of the whole ecosphere.
Third Law:  We must conserve natural resources.
-  Adapted from Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace  

 

"We—human beings—are part of 'biodiversity.'  We are dependent on the whole food chain down below us."
-  Darrell Merrell   

 

"Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos."
-  Spaulding Gray

 

"Biological order is both architectural and functional; furthermore, at the cellular and super-cellular levels, it manifests itself by a series of structures and coupled functions of growing complexity and hierarchical character. This is contrary to the concept of evolution as described in the thermodynamics of isolated systems, which leads simply ... to 'disorder.' ... The unexpected new feature is that non-equilibrium may ... lead to a new type of structure, the Dissipative structures, which are essential in the understanding of coherence and organization in the non-equilibrium world in which we live."
-  Ilya Prigogine (1917-2013), From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences

 

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's there are few."
-  Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind  

 

"Diversity ... is not polite accommodation.  Instead, diversity is, in action, the sometimes painful awareness that other people, other races, other voices, other habits of mind, have as much integrity of being, as much claim on the world as you do.  And I urge you, amid all the differences present to the eye and mind, to reach out to create the bond that will protect us all.  We are meant to be here together."
-  William Chase  

 

"What is man without the beasts?  If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit.  For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man.  All things are connected."
-  Chief Seattle

 

 

"  "For the Eastern mystic, all things and events perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected and are but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality.  Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentally.  It is called avidya, or ignorance, in Buddhist philosophy and is seen as the sate of a disturbed mind which has to be overcome.  When the mind is disturbed, the multiplicity of things is produced, but when the mind is quieted, the multiplicity of things disappears.'  Although the various schools of Eastern mysticism differ in many details, they all emphasize the basic unity of the universe which is the central feature of their teachings.  The highest aim for their followers - whether they are Hindus, Buddhists or Taoists - is to become aware of the unity and mutual interdependence of all things, to transcend the notion of an isolated individual self and to identify themselves with the ultimate reality.  The emergence of this awareness - known as 'enlightenment'- is not only an intellectual act but is an experience which involves the whole person and is religious in its ultimate nature.  For this reason, most Eastern philosophies are essentially religious philosophies."
-  Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, 25th Anniversary Edition, p. 24  


   In my experience, life is rightly characterized as diverse, complicated, varied, rich in multiplicity, saturated with the 'ten thousand things.'  Personally, I find little need to seek or to find or to have the "experience of unity."  This state of "unification," when actualized, is in most cases rather fleeting.  It may be profound, but no more so that the beauty of complexity and the fascinating reality of diversity.  I do not find the experience of the multiplicity of things distressing, disturbing, or disheartening. 

Just because all of the eggs today are in one basket does not make the colored basket more real or more interesting or more valuable than the eggs. 

Ignoring the facticity of the complexity of the natural and mental realms seems to me a more serious ignorance, not very sensible, and ultimately unwise.  I long ago gave up on any quest for "enlightenment" (in Hindu or Buddhist terms) and prefer the ordinary state of mind grounded in a world that is not simple, not one, not unified, complex, and rich in details.  To claim that our normal experience of complexity and variety is an "illusion" or "ignorance (avidya) seems to me a form of incorrect judgment. 

No doubt, trying to simplify one's life has its benefits, reducing sensory overload can reduce stress, and not becoming overly infatuated with novelty can be helpful; but, pushing on this strange path towards the "enlightenment" or "realization" of a pure and uncluttered "Unity" can produce its own distressing and disturbing predicaments for a person. 

Many philosophers, ancient and modern, have made a sharp distinction between appearances and Reality, the many and the One, the phenomena and the Noumena, and multiplicity and Unity.  For me, it is muddled thinking to call all of our experiences "just fleeting illusions" and fabricate a true realm of being outside of our personal and social and practical experiences.  Indeed, we can't "see" in any ordinary sense of "see," the cells, molecules, atoms, and the subatomic particles that constitute the objects of our macrocosmic world; but, this in no way means the multiplicity of objects in our ordinary environment are in any way "illusions."  The meaning of "objects" is much more complicated, varied in linguistic usage, and functional in many practical contexts.  Again, complexity is closer to the truth.  

"I, who make no other profession, find in myself such infinite depth and variety, that what I have learned bears no other fruit than to make me realize how much I still have to learn.  To my weakness, so often perceived, I owe my inclination to coolness in my opinions and any hatred for that aggressiveness and quarrelsome arrogance that believes and trust wholly in itself, a mortal enemy of discipline and truth."
- Michel de Montaigne, "Of Experience," 1588


Our selves are, to Montaigne, "wavelike and varying" - ondoyant et divers." 

-  By Mike Garofalo, "
Awareness of Unity," Cloud Hands Blog Post in September, 2015.


 

 

"When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex."
-  Marguerite Yourcenar 

 

"To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things."
-  Zen Master Dogen  

 

"The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless.  I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."
-  Alice Munro 

 

Illustrated Guides to Food Plants 
Green Inheritance: Saving the Plants of the World by Anthony Huxley 
Medicinal Plants of the World by Ben Eric van Wyk 
Edible: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Food Plants by National Geographic 
Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit: An Illustrated Encyclopedia by Matthew Biggs 
Food Plants of the World: An Illustrated Guide by Ben Eric van Wyk 
The New Oxford Book of Food Plants by John Vaughan 
The New Oxford Book of Food Plants by Elizabeth Schneider  

 

                                           

 

 

"Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item."
-  Claude Levi-Strauss

 

"The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God."
-  Benedict De Spinoza  

 

"God is in the details."
-  Mies Van Der Rohe  

 

"Caress the detail, the divine detail."
-  Vladimir Nabokov  

 

"Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work."
-  Thomas E. Lovejoy

 

"Details are all there are."
-  Maezumi Roshi 

 

"We think in generalities, but we live in details."
-  W.H. Auden

 

Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Adrian Desmond and James Moore 
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin  
Origin of the Species: The Annotated Original, A Facsimile of the First Edition by Charles Darwin 
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins 

 

"If you take care of the little things, the big things take care of themselves."
-  R. Reese 

 

"We work with the stuff of the soul by means of the things of life."
-  Thomas Moore  

 

"The current massive degradation of habitat and extinction of species is taking place on a catastrophically short timescale, and their effects will fundamentally reset the future evolution of the planet's biota."
-  National Academy of Sciences

 

"To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things."
-  Zen Master Dogen

 

"Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones.
Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave."
-  William Blake  

 

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick  
Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory by Neil Johnson   
The Essence Of Chaos by Edward Lorenz 
Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics by Gary Zukav  
Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity by John Gribbin 
Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven Strogatz 
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism by Fritjof Capra 

 

                             

 

 

"The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things.  Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, - there is no Deity."
-  R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p. 144.  

 

"When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things."
-  Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, p 131  

 

"(1) "irreversible processes are as real as reversible ones." (2) "irreversible processes play a fundamental constructive role in the physical world." (3) "irreversibility is deeply rooted in dynamics."
-  Ilya Prigogine (1917-2013), From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences

 

"Do things noncoercively (wuwei),
Be non-interfering in going about your business (wushi),
And savor the flavor of the unadulterated in what you eat. Treat the small as great and the few as many.
Requite enmity with character (de). 
Take account of the difficult while it is still easy,
And deal with the large while it is still tiny.  
The most difficult things in the world originate with the easy,
And the largest issues originate with the tiny.
Thus, it is because the sages never try to do great things
That they are indeed able to be great. 
One who makes promises lightly is sure to have little credibility;
One who finds everything easy is certain to have lots of difficulties.
Thus, it is because even the sages pay careful attention to such things
That they are always free of difficulties."
-   Chapter 63, Daodejing
    Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall  

 

"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.  His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for).  ...   The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals..."
-  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac  

 

"Statistics are like a bikini.   What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."
-  Aaron Levenstein   

 

"Step out onto the Planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.
Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.
How many can you find?"
-  Lew Welch  

 

"We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love."
-  Stephen Jay Gould

 

"Soil . . . scoop up a handful of the magic stuff.   Look at it closely. What wonders it holds as it lies there in your palm.  Tiny sharp grains of sand, little faggots of wood and leaf fiber, infinitely small round pieces of marble, fragments of shell, specks of black carbon, a section of vertebrae from some minute creature.  And mingling with it all the dust of countless generations of plants and flowers, trees, animals and – yes – our own, age-long forgotten forebears, gardeners of long ago.  Can this incredible composition be the common soil?"
-  Stuart Maddox Masters, The Seasons Through

 

"Everything is both simpler than we can imagine, and more complicated that we can conceive."
-  Goethe 

 

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
-  Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest  

 

"The value of biodiversity is more than the sum of its parts."
-  Byran G. Norton 

 

"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."
-  Henry Miller 

 

"The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle of capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity."
-  Richard Dawkins 

 

"For the beginning is assuredly
the end -- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities."
-   William Carlos Williams, Patterson, 1946, Book I, p.3  

 

 

Seeds and Cuttings
Hydrofarm Hot House Seed Starter 11-by-22-Inch   
Secrets of Plant Propagation: Starting Your Own Flowers, Vegetables, Fruits, Shrubs, and Trees 
Hydrofarm Jump Start Indoor Grow Light System 
Plant Propagation A to Z: Growing Plants for Free  
Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners  
Hydrofarm Germination Station with Heat Mat  
American Horticultural Society Plant Propagation: The Fully Illustrated Plant-by-Plant Manual    
Burpee Seed Starter: A Guide to Growing Flower, Vegetable, and Herb Seeds Indoors and Outdoors
Plant Propagator's Bible
The New Seed Starter's Handbook
RION MLT3 Mini Lean-To Greenhouse
Seed Sowing and Saving: Step-by-Step Techniques for Collecting and Growing  
Saving Seeds: The Gardener's Guide to Growing and Storing Vegetable and Flower Seeds
Seed Sowing and Saving: Step-by-Step Techniques for Collecting and Growing More Than 100 Vegetables, Flowers, and Herbs

 

                                    

 

 

"Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and whole, and has  remained complex and whole ever since—not because of a mysterious élan vital, but thanks to the simple, profound transformation of dead molecules into an organization by which each molecule's formation is catalyzed by some other molecule in the organization.  The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of collective catalytic closure.  So, in another sense, life—complex, whole, emergent—is simple after all, a natural outgrowth of the world in which we live."
-   Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, p. 47  

 

"We consider species to be like a brick in the foundation of a building. You can probably lose one or two or a dozen bricks and still have a standing house. But by the time you've lost 20 per cent of species, you're going to destabilize the entire structure. That's the way ecosystems work."
-  Donald Falk 

 

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."
-  Mary Oliver, Wild Geese  

 

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The Spirit of Gardening Website

Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, and Insights
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       From January 1, 1999 through March 1, 2011
This webpage has been online since January 1999
Compiled by Karen Garofalo and Mike Garofalo from Red Bluff, California
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