October 31, 2016 - 17:03
"The potato habit was a hard one to break, and the trasformation happened slowly. One of the things Lloyd loved about potatoes is that they stayed alive......'Look, Yumi! They're alive. Living and breathing.' Then he explained how cloning worked and how every potate was capable of creating endless offspring out of trunks of its living flesh, and I felt so proud, like I was a little chunk of his......Usually they can stay that way for almost a year before they start to wither and die. Of course, that is the problem with living things--they have a life span that cannot be exceeded."(p.112-113)
"Every seed has a story, Geek says, encrypted in a narrative line that stretches back for thousands of years. And if you trace that story, traveling with that little seed backward in time, you might find yourself tucked into an immigrant's hatband or swen into the hem of a yound wife's dress as she smuggles you from the old country in to the New World.......Seeds tell the sory of migrations and drifts, so if you learn to read them, they are very much like books--with one big difference......Of course, this is what planting is all about-- the ancient human impulse to harness that miracle and to make it perform for our benefit. To emulate the divine author an dtease forth a new crop of stories from the earth. "(p.171)
"'You want to know what my heritage has taught me? If you're a cactus, you'd better hang on to your spines.'
'I believe that," Geek said, looking at me closely."But Burbank said that the secret of improved plant breeding is love.'"(p.178)