Literary notes about plant (AI summary)
The word "plant" appears in literature with a rich variety of meanings and connotations. In some works it evokes the natural world—a nurturing, vulnerable entity that grows and flourishes, as in Burns’ call to "protect and guard the mother plant" ([1]) or in meditations on a flower's impending bloom ([2]). In other contexts the term shifts its register entirely, referring not to flora but to modern industrial or mechanical settings, such as a "power plant" that houses reactor components ([3], [4]). Authors also use "plant" metaphorically to suggest gradual growth or deep-rooted influence, as when a character is compared to a "plant of slow growth" ([5]) or encouraged to "plant your feet" firmly ([6]). This array of usages—from botanical descriptions and agricultural commands to technical and symbolic imagery—demonstrates the word’s versatility and its power to bridge the realms of nature, industry, and metaphor in literary expression.
- May He, the friend o' Woe and Want, Who heals life's various stounds, Protect and guard the mother plant, And heal her cruel wounds.
— from Poems and Songs of Robert Burns by Robert Burns - And he spent his afternoons now with some regularity meditating on the approaching flowering of this strange plant.
— from The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories by H. G. Wells - The coils of fuel wire were ready to load, and the power slugs for the ship’s reactor were already stored in the power plant building here at Olympus.
— from The Lani People by Jesse F. Bone - The H-1 liquid-propellant rocket engine was an outgrowth of the LR-79 which served as the basic power plant for the USAF Thor missile.
— from Rockets, Missiles, and Spacecraft of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution - His influence with men was a plant of slow growth.
— from Aesop's Fables by Aesop - Plant your feet with the centres of the two heels in line with the target.
— from Boy Scouts Handbook by Boy Scouts of America
