Harry's first publication (in 1951) was a short paper in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club entitled "Interesting weeds in New York City." It was during some of his collecting in the wilderness which is the Bronx that he was accosted by several policemen in a squad car, who demanded what he was doing with his odd vasculum over his shoulder. He explained he was a botanist and he was collecting plants. "You know all these weeds?", asked one the men. Upon being assured that he did, he was asked to join them in the car which drove some distance until they came to an open lot on which there was a flourishing crop. "What is it?" "Marihuana," was the reply. Whereupon one of the officers exploded, "Damn those kids, they told us they were tomatoes."

It is said of Muad’Dib that once when he saw a weed trying to grow between two rocks, he moved one of the rocks. Later, when the weed was seen to be flourishing, he covered it with the remaining rock. “That was its fate,” he explained.

Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him.

If God wanted us to get high, he'd have created plants that became psychoactive when eaten or smoked.

'She taught me this above all else: things which don't shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won't make it. We won't survive...' (p126)

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way.

He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains.

I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don't like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground.

This place may indeed be haunted,” he thought, “perhaps by the delighted soul of Sir Walter Raleigh, patron of the weed, but seemingly not by the proprietors.

[In his Highgrove garden.] I happily talk to the plants and trees, and listen to them. I think it's absolutely crucial [...] Everything I've done here, it's like almost with your children. Every tree has a meaning for me.

He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is. and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs... Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?

he came to know the god intimately and the strange mad flower of his mind dripped in the dark