Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1511/en

Just as the material diversity of the root bark forms a living context with the leaf rosette, so does the leaf sequence of the shoot with the inflorescence. The transformation of leaf forms up the stem to the flower — leaf metamorphosis — is the image-made expression of the substance-forming and substance-transforming processes taking place invisibly within the living. As the shoot grows upward, it passes out of the domain of the earthy-watery into that of warmth and light-permeated air. Here the forces of the sun and the planetary spheres ray in directly and presently. Here, for the first time, the essential archetype of valerian impresses itself — in its fullness — as reflected image upon the substance-process already pre-formed in the rhizome-root. As the forces working within the earthy-watery predominate in the rootstock, so in the upward-striving shoot the forces of light and warmth, mediated through the air. May that be the reason why the dull, consciousness-dulling smell and the astringent-bitter taste of the rootstock makes itself felt hardly at all in the leaves — though it does appear, in less intense form, in the stem? In the root these qualities condense and concentrate; in the succession of leaves, by contrast, they enter a steady transformation, flowing onward.