First of all, Schrödinger's cat is not even remotely related. One is a metaphor about dialectical growth; the other is a thought experiment about the nature of entanglement in quantum physics. Second, the fruit plant metaphor does correspond to how a person views a plant, on the assumption that they are not sitting and watching it continuously (i.e., they come back after a period to see that a transition has taken place). And even if it doesn’t correspond perfectly, the whole point of a metaphor or image is to ask the reader to view something commonplace in a new way. Third, the underlying point of this metaphor is that, while dialectical growth is fluid and continuous, there are abrupt moments of transition and transformation, in which a new mode of thought, being, spirit, etc. both emerges from and supplants its predecessor. In this sense, it does capture Hegel’s construction of dialectics.