I read today Michael Pollan's article in the New York Times from 16 1/2 years ago entitled Autumn, It's No Garden Party. As the title suggests it is a treatise concerning the transformations of the Fall season, both of the natural state of plants and the work required to gather the current harvest and plan for the season to come a few months down the road. I found especially enlightening the following quote concerning the evolutionary flirting of plants with animals:
"Autumn color in the woods signals the abdication of chlorophyll; in the garden, among the annuals, it means something else. With their ripe, tinted fruits the plants aim to flag down passing animals, offering them food in exchange for giving their seeds a lift out of here. By late September the plants are concentrating all their energies on this process—on writing down their secrets on tiny seed tablets and then encouraging someone, anyone, to take them out into the world. Recipes, instruction manuals, last testaments: by making seeds the plant condenses itself, or at least everything it knows, into a form compact and durable enough to survive winter, a tightly sealed bottle of genetic memory dropped onto the ocean of the future."
I was also inspired by his illustration drawn from a historical study in describing how earth is not a closed system in which we are to be fearful of using up all its resources:
"The first person to verify that indeed this (natures incredible ROI) is a miracle was a 17th-century scientist by the name of Van Helmont. He planted a willow sapling in a container that held 200 pounds of soil and, for five years, gave it nothing but water. At the end of that time, the tree was found to weigh 169 pounds, and the soil 199 pounds, 14 ounces—from just two ounces of soil had come 169 pounds of tree. Rich increase, indeed."
Perhaps the best was saved for the proverbial last, though, when he quoted from Thoreau's Autumnal Tints concerning how the crunch of fallen leaves instructs us how to die gracefully, sweetly and with honor:
"How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!...They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,—with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails."
2 comments:
Only tangentially related - I read in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything that there is a species of bacteria that lives as a unicellular organism when conditions are good. When conditions are bad, however, the bacteria group together and form a snail, which moves to whereever the conditions are better. Then when it reaches that place the snail transforms into a plant with a stem and a seedpod at the top that explodes when ripe, spreading spores everywhere which form into new bacteria.
That's a damn fine trick.
As tangents go, that's one super fine addition to the post, sir. A damn fine trick indeed...and one I wish I possessed.
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