Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Excerpts from Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817)

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#267.
The process of shaping and reproduction of the single individual coincides in this way with the process of genus formation. And because self-like generality, the subjective unit of individuality, does not separate itself from real particularization but is only submerged in it, the plant does not move from its place, nor is it a self-interrupting individualization, but a continually flowing self-nourishment. It does not relate itself to individualized inorganic nature, but to the general elements. Nor is it capable of feeling and animal warmth.

#268.
Insofar, however, as life is essentially the concept which realizes itself only through self-division and reunification, the plant processes also diverge from each other. (1) But their inner process of formation is to be seen partly as the positive, merely immediate transformation of nourishment supplies into the specific nature of plants. On the one hand, and for the sake of essential simplicity, this is the division into abstract generality of an implicitly inseparable individuality, as into the negative of vitality, becoming wood. But on the other hand, on the side of individuality and vitality, this is the process specifying itself in an outward direction.

#269.
(2) This is the unfolding of the parts as organs of different elementary relations, the division partly into the relation to earth and into the air and water process which mediates them. Since the plant does not hold itself back in inner, subjective generality against outer individuality, it is equally torn out of itself by light, from which it takes the specific confirmation and individualization of itself, knotted and multiplied into a multiplicity of individuals.

#270.
Since, however, the reproduction of the individual vegetable as a singularity is not the subjective return into itself, a feeling of self, but inwardly becomes wooden, the production of the self of the plant consequently moves in an outward direction. The plant brings forth its light as its own self in the blossom, in which the neutral color green is determined as a specific coloration, or, too, light is produced as a white color, purified from the dark.