37 Quotes by Amy Stewart

I’d always felt that one could read a woman’s discontent in the amount of embroidery in her sitting room. It gave me a crowded and nervous feeling to sit among so much frantic stitchery.

During Prohibition, enterprising California grape growers kept themselves in business by selling “fruit bricks” – blocks of dried, compressed grapes that were packaged with wine-making yeast. A label warned purchasers not to dissolve the fruit brick in warm water and add the yeast packet, as this would result in fermentation and the creation of alcohol, which was illegal.

Everyone with a camera and a set of draperies runs a portrait studio. Miss.

Angels’ Share: In storage, a small amount of alcohol escapes the barrel through evaporation. Distillers call this lost alcohol the angels’ share. Whiskey and brandy makers estimate that the angels get about 2 percent of the alcohol in a barrel each year, although that can vary depending on humidity and temperature. Fortunately, they can afford to lose some, as most spirits are aged at a higher proof than the final bottling.

But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you’re left with, at the end of the day, is this: a stretch of freshly turned dirt, a handful of seeds scratched into the surface, and a marker to remember where they went. It is at the same time an incredibly brave and an incredibly simple thing to do, entrusting your seeds to the earth and waiting for them to rise up out of the ground to meet you.

Drunken botanists? Given the role they play in creating the world’s great drinks, it’s a wonder there are any sober botanists at all.

It didn’t help that Norma had all the girlish charm of a boulder.

Where the years ahead had once seemed vague and unknowable, amorphous in shape and indeterminable in size, after my mother died I began to see a set of decades stacked neatly in front of me like bricks... When I allowed myself to think of the brevity of the time ahead of me, and the futility of spending any more of it on cooking and mending and gardening, it frightened me so much that I almost couldn’t breathe.

Mango and cashew trees also produce the irritating resin known as urishol, as does the lacquer tree. In fact, people who are highly sensitive to poison ivy or one of its cousins may experience a cross-sensitivity to mango rind or a lacquer-covered box.