There is a fundamental and culturally learned power imbalance between men and women, and it follows us into the workplace. The violence born of this imbalance follows us also. We would like to believe that it stops short of following us into the laboratory and into the field - but it does not.

Plants are decisive to a fault. A stem produces a bud that flowers once and once only. It offers pollen that is either dispersed or goes nowhere. One pollen grain either enters a stigma or it falls upon stony ground. An ovum is either fertilized or the whole project stalls out.

When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch.

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

I think it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they've spent a big chunk of their childhood or they're growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.

I feel like I'm the same scientist I was back when I couldn't get a grant. Now I'm that same person thinking that same way getting grants. That system of external rewards in science has always mystified me. It's fickle. And I also don't think it was constructed with people like me in mind.

During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew.

Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world.

I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.

I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.

I like weeds and hardy plants.

I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.

I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby.

While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.

You can't drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It's where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain or fed to you as syrup or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank.

I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.

If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.

Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.

A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.

A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits.

You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.

Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.