The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

My wager is that when we can find nature in these sorts of places as readily as we now find it in the wild, we’ll have traveled a considerable distance toward understanding our place

Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression.

“Flying penises” is what one botanist called bees.