John Ruskin

“ Nevertheless, I would have used Gerarde's name, if the corn-rose were as much a rose as the corn-flag is a flag. But it isn't. The rose and lily have quite different relations to the corn. The lily is grass in loveliness, as the corn is grass in use; and both grow together in peace—gladiolus in the wheat, and narcissus in the pasture. But the rose is of another and higher order than the corn, and you never saw a cornfield overrun with sweetbriar or apple-blossom.
They have no mind, they, to get into the wrong place. ”

“ When it grows entirely underground it is called a root-stock. But there is no essential distinction between a root-stock and a creeping stem, only the root-stock may be thought of as a stem which shares the melancholy humour of a root in loving darkness, while yet it has enough consciousness of better things to grow towards, or near, the light. In one family it is even fragrant where the flower is not, and a simple houseleek is called 'rhodiola rosea,' because its root-stock has the scent of a rose. ”

“ All the most perfect fruits are developed from exquisite forms either of foliage or flower. The vine leaf, in its generally decorative power, is the most important, both in life and in art, of all that shade the habitations of men. The olive leaf is, without any rival, the most beautiful of the leaves of timber trees; and its blossom, though minute, of extreme beauty. The apple is essentially the fruit of the rose, and the peach of her only rival in her own colour. The cherry and orange blossom are the two types of floral snow. ”

“ You think it, perhaps, a matter of course that a plant is not to be a crawling thing? It is not a matter of course at all. A vegetable might be just what it is now, as compared with an animal;—might live on earth and water instead of on meat,—might be as senseless in life, as calm in death, and in all its parts and apparent structure [28] unchanged; and yet be a crawling thing. It is quite as easy to conceive plants moving about like lizards, putting forward first one root and then another, as it is to think of them fastened to their place. ”

“ What outline its petals really have, however, is little shown in their crumpled fluttering; but that very crumpling arises from a fine floral character which we do not enough value in them. We usually think of the poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the field. The rest—nearly all of them—depend on the texture of their surfaces for colour. But the poppy is painted glass; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. ”

“ For the first instinct of the stem,—unnamed by us yet—unthought of,—the instinct of seeking light, as of the root to seek darkness,—what words can enough speak the wonder of it.
Look. Here is the little thing, Line-study V. (A) , in its first birth to us: the stem of stems; the one of which we pray that it may bear our daily bread. The seed has fallen in the ground with the springing germ of it downwards; with heavenly cunning the taught stem curls round, and seeks the never-seen light. ”

“ But think how wonderful this imperishableness of the stem of many plants is, even in their annual work: how much more in their perennial work! The noble stability between death and life, of a piece of perfect wood? It cannot grow, but will not decay; keeps record of its years of life, but surrenders them to become a constantly serviceable thing: which may be sailed in, on the sea, built with, on the land, carved by Donatello, painted on by Fra Angelico. ”

“ Between the herb, which perishes annually, and the plants which construct year after year an increasing stem, there is, of course, no difficulty of discernment; but between the plants which, like these Oreiades, construct for themselves richest intricacy of supporting stem, yet scarcely rise a fathom's height above the earth they gather and adorn,—between these, and the trees that lift cathedral aisles of colossal shade on Andes and Lebanon,—where is the limit of kind to be truly set? ”

“ Great part of your life and character, as a human creature, has depended on that. Suppose all leaves had been spacious, like some palm leaves; solid, like cactus stem; or that trees had grown, as they might of course just as easily have grown, like mushrooms, all one great cluster of leaf round one stalk. I do not say that they are divided into small leaves only for your delight, or your service, as if you were the monarch of everything—even in this atom of a globe. You are made of your proper size ”

“ For every little rose of it has a green darkness in the centre—not even a pretty green, but a faded, yellowish, glutinous, unaccomplished green; and round that, all over the surface of the blossom, whose shell-like petals are themselves deep sunk, with grey shadows in the hollows of them—all above this already subdued brightness, are strewn the dark points of the dead stamens—manifest more and more, the longer one looks, as a kind of grey sand, sprinkled without sparing over what looked at first unspotted light. ”

“ Gather a green poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its side; break it open and unpack the poppy. The whole flower is there complete in size and colour,—its stamens full-grown, but all packed so closely that the fine silk of the petals is crushed into a million of shapeless wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from torture: the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground; the aggrieved corolla smooths itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can ”

“ There is no base pertinacity, no overweening conceit, in the Black Douglas, or Claverhouse, or Montrose; in these we find the pure Scottish temper, of heroic endurance and royal pride; but, when, in the pay, and not deceived, but purchased, idolatry of Mammon, the Scottish persistence and pride become knit and vested in the spleuchan, and your stiff Covenanter makes his covenant with Death, and your Old Mortality deciphers only the senseless legends of the eternal gravestone,—you get your weed, earth-grown, in bitter verity, and earth-devastating, in bitter strength. ”

“ Divide the feeble nervous thread, and all life ceases. Nay, in the tree the root is even of greater importance. You will not kill the tree, as you would an animal, by dividing its body or trunk. The part not severed from the root will shoot again. But in the root, and its touch of the ground, is the life of it. My own definition of a plant would be "a living creature whose source of vital energy is in the earth" (or in the water, as a form of the earth; that is, in inorganic substance) . ”

“ Being prepared now to find among plants many things which are like roots, yet are not; you may simplify and make fast your true idea of a root as a fibre or group of fibres, which fixes, animates, and partly feeds the leaf. Then practically, as you examine plants in detail, ask first respecting them: What kind of root have they? Is it large or small in proportion to their bulk, and why is it so? What soil does it like, and what properties does it acquire from it? The endeavour to answer these questions will soon lead you to a rational inquiry into the plant's history. ”

“ You may read the history of the being of half the earth in one of those green oval leaves—the things that the sun and the rivers have made out of dry ground. Daphne—daughter of Enipeus, and beloved by the Sun,—that fable gives you at once the two great facts about vegetation. Where warmth is, and moisture—there, also, the leaf. Where no warmth—there is no leaf; where there is no dew—no leaf. ”

“ But, for the present, rest content with the general and sure knowledge that, fixed or flowing, measurable or immeasurable—one with electricity or heat or light, or quite distinct from any of them—life is a delightful, and its negative, death, a dreadful thing, to human creatures; and that you can give or gather a certain quantity of life into plants, animals, and yourself by wisdom and courage, and by their reverses can bring upon them any quantity of death you please, which is a much more serious point for you to consider than what life and death are. ”

“ Then, lastly, if this rudeness and insensitiveness of nature be gifted with no redeeming beauty; if the boss of the thistle lose its purple, and the star of the Lion's tooth, its light; and, much more, if service be perverted as beauty is lost, and the honied tube, and medicinal leaf, change into mere swollen emptiness, and salt brown membrane, swayed in nerveless languor by the idle sea,—at last the separation between the two natures is as great as between the fruitful earth and fruitless ocean ”

“ In the first of the poems of which the English Government has appointed a portion to be sung every day for the instruction and pleasure of the people, there occurs this curious statement respecting any person who will behave himself rightly: "He shall be like a tree planted by the river side, that bears its fruit in its season. His leaf also shall not wither; and you will see that whatever he does will prosper." ”

“ Some flowers don't like being squeezed at all (fancy a squeezed convolvulus!) ; but these heather bells like it, and look all the prettier for it,—not the squeezed ones exactly, by themselves, but the cluster altogether, by their patience.
Then also the outside ones get pushed into a sort of star-shape, and in front show the colour of all their sides, and at the back the rich green cluster of sharp leaves that hold them; all this order being as essential to the plant as any of the more formal structures of the bell itself. ”

“ That life, when it is real, is not evanescent; is not slight; does not vanish away. Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven for ever in the work of the world; by so much, evermore, the strength of the human race has gained; more stubborn in the root, higher towards heaven in the branch; and, "as a teil tree, and as an oak,—whose substance is in them [63] when they cast their leaves,—so the holy seed is in the midst thereof." ”

“ A seed may serve, and many do mightily serve, for the food of man, when boiled, crushed, or otherwise industriously prepared by man himself, for his mere sustenance. But the husk of the seed is prepared in many cases for the delight of his eyes, and the pleasure of his palate, by Nature herself, and is then called a 'fruit.'
3. The varieties of structure both in seed and husk, and yet more, the manner in which the one is contained, and distributed by, the other, are infinite; and in some cases the husk is apparently wanting, or takes some unrecognizable form. ”

“ Nor is the world so small but that we may yet leave in it also unconquered spaces of beautiful solitude; where the chamois and red deer may wander fearless,—nor any fire of avarice scorch from the Highlands of Alp, or Grampian, the rapture of the heath, and the rose. ”

“ If we think honestly, our thoughts will not only live usefully, but even perish usefully—like the moss—and become dark, not without due service. But if we think dishonestly, or malignantly, our thoughts will die like evil fungi,—dripping corrupt dew. ”

“ The creature has no heart to beat like ours; one cannot take refuge from the mystery in a 'muscular contraction.' Fountain without supply—playing by its own force, for ever rising and falling all through the days of Spring, spending itself at last in gathered clouds of leaves, and iris of blossom. ”

“ If we do not steal the store, next year the plant lives upon it, raises its stem, flowers and seeds out of that abundance, and having fulfilled its destiny, and provided for its successor, passes away, root and branch together. ”

“ In the great Psalm of life, we are told that everything that a man doeth shall prosper, so only that he delight in the law of his God, that he hath not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor sat in the seat of the scornful. Is it among these leaves of the perpetual Spring,—helpful leaves for the healing of the nations,—that we mean to have our part and place, or rather among the "brown skeletons of leaves that lag, the forest brook along"? ”