Glory

The temple bell stops
But I still hear the sound
Coming out of the flowers

-- Basho

Windgrass

Following a post earlier today, some poetical personification from Alice Oswald:

Dense Silky Bent 

Also there is an old man dressed in a rustling softness
with long washed hair and a little beard cut square
often to be seen at dawn performing stretches to the sun
and doesn't care who watches, stares straight through anyone
with baleful, buzzard-on-a-fencepost vision.
When he leans to the side and breathes in lout and out
with accompanying swearwords, he seems small and sour
like a lost lover withered to a straw.
But when he forward-bends and his loose shirt
flops on his blinking eyes and swishes in the dirt
sometimes we kick him from behind, he doesn't mind,
just springs up green again and stares at the sun.

Vegetable love

Rob Dunn has a nice essay on the glory and diversity of leaves.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings largely focuses on heterotrophs, but autotrophs are equally astonishing. Montaigne's words should not be forgotten:

There is a kind of respect and a duty in man...which link[s] us not merely to the beasts, which have life and feelings, but even to trees and plants.

And I like this from the conclusion of What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz:

A shared genetic past does not negate eons of evolution. While plants and humans maintain parallel abilities to sense and be aware of the physical world, the independent paths of evolution have led to a uniquely human capacity, beyond intelligence, that plants don't have: the ability to care.

So the next time you find yourself on a stroll through a park, take a second to ask yourself: What does the dandelion in the lawn see? What does the grass smell? Touch the swooping branches of a beech, knowing that the tree will remember it was touched. But it won't remember you. You, on the other hand, can remember that particular tree and carry the memory of it with you forever.

Elsewhere, Ed Yong considers whether humans will ever photosynthesize like plants.

Photo: Viburnum leaf by Michael Melford

See also The brotherhood of men and cabbages

Wild Flower

On the Spanish side of the Pyrenees mountains, around 850 metres above sea level, two adjacent cliff faces hold the entire population of Borderea chouardii – one of the world’s rarest plants. It’s a small herb that grows into crevices in the rock. Its leaves are heart-shaped and its flowers green and unassuming. There are around 10,000 individuals here, all growing on a square kilometre of vertical rock.

Now, Maria Garcia form the Spanish National Research Council has discovered the plant’s survival strategy, which involves three different species of ants. Through these multiple partnerships, B.chouardii quite literally clings to existence.

The plant is a relict, an ancient hanger-on from a time just after the death of the dinosaurs, when the Pyrenees enjoyed a tropical climate.

  -- Ed Yong

Led by the nose

Then I have a more outlandish thought. Does the gorse smell me, and know there is a living thing near it? Is it directing its fragrant come-ons my way? This was an outrageously egocentric notion but not out of the question. Natural smells are not just random chemical emissions, they're part of a complex messaging system between plant and plant, animal and plant. Rats emit an airborne chemical signal, a pheromone, when they're afraid which turns on a natural analgesic in other rats in the vicinity to prepare them for pain. When oak leaves are seriously munched by insects they too emit a pheromone which promotes the production of extra tannin in neighbouring trees which makes their leaves more bitter to marauders. Mopane trees in Africa, a favourite food of elephants, do the same and send out messages to other trees when they're being browsed. The elephants are wise to this trick. They eat only a few leaves from each tree and move upwind to new trees. "We can't hear the trees calling to each other," wrote the science writer Colin Tudge, "but the air is abuzz with their consersations nonetheless, conducted in vaporous chemistry."

-- Richard Mabey in The Stinkhorn and the Perfumier, the third of his essays series The Scientist and the Romantic. The reason we know so much about scents we cannot ourselves smell, he explains, is thanks to the electron capture detector invented by James Lovelock in the 1960s:

It's been this instrument which has revealed that fruit flies will respond to as little as one hundred millionth of a gram of a pheromone produced by cassia plants, that lima beans affected by spider mite give off a volatile chemical in minute concentrations that attracts another species of predatory mite that feeds on the original mites. It's helped untangle the extraordinary life cycle of the Large Blue butterfly...

The electron capture detection has also helped us understand the plight of "that gravely threatened creature, the bee":

Honey bees are able to read and interpret chemical cues diffused into the atmosphere over a range forty square kilometres and convey the information back to other bees to their colony. But we now know that the residues of exhaust from cars using lead free petrol react with the odour molecules from flowers, making them indecipherable to bees. This may be one of the causes of the now widespread problem of hive collapse.

Earlier in the essay Mabey discusses scent and memory in his own life, how it unlocks his own "vast structure of recollection" (Proust), not least the associations of various flowers and woodland smells throughout the year. "The puzzle", says Mabey, "is why we're so good at scents despite their having little relevance to our survival and why they're linked to emotion. Scents unlock memories I sometimes didn't know I had":

Smell isn't the oldest sense. The earliest cells must have first acquired an ability to orient themselves in space and respond to warmth, But the identification of food and the necessity of interacting with other organisms entailed the development of this chemical messaging system and we've inherited it. Long before we began to register sense consciously our behaviour was being guided by them. They helped us in finding a mate and bonding with children and tribe, with locating food and avoiding danger, with interpreting the weather and the comings and goings of other creatures. The smell receptors were the foundations of the limbic system, a primitive centre concerned with basic emotions and the recording of sensation, and it was round this that the apparatus of memory began to evolve. Our brains are outgrowth of our noses. No wonder that smells remain the great carriers and triggers of potent memories. They're both processed in the same ancient areas of our brains.

Lewis Thomas had a vision of an entire planet regulated by its smells:

In this immense organism, chemical signs might serve the function of global hormones, keeping balance and symmetry in the operation of various interrelated working parts, informing tissues in the vegatation of the Alps about the state of eels in the Sargasso Sea by long interminable relays on interconnected messages between all kinds of other creatures.

In the arms of a giant

James and the Giant Tree (BBC Radio 4)

Flower (2)

...While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, were among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when "modern" insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings -- and they might never have appeared. The would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. the idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with awe.

The notion of such vast eons of time, and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds -- worlds of enormous richness and variety -- was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided, for many of us, a sense of deep meaning and satisfaction that belief in a Divine Plan had never achieved. The world became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life...

-- from Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers by Oliver Sacks.

Flower

An article by James O'Donahuge on the origin of angiosperms (flowering plants) reminds that human origin and continued existence depends on them:

Our distant primate ancestors thrived in the ancient flowering forests, while early humans got their big break on the grassy savannahs of East Africa. More recently, human populations have exploded thanks to the cultivation of cereals, vegetables and fruit. Every step of the way, our own successes have depended on angiosperms.

In the sacred cycad forest, it is the job of the Rain Queen to protect much older plants.


Encephalartos transvenosus

Vegetable love

Brian Aldiss's 1962 novel Hothouse (shortly to appear in a new edition) portrays a world of fantastic, semi-sentient carnivorous plants, where human and animal life have been driven to the edge of extinction.

In the real world, meanwhile, poison ivy is "proliferating like mad as rising levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide heat up the atmosphere" (It Eats CO2 for Breakfast), and Americans are re-examining their attitude to the well-behaved lawn (Turf War).

Flower power

[By] increasing the numbers of male [wasps], [the orchid] could even make [them] a bit more desperate and less discriminating — another potential advantage for an orchid trying to fool a male into giving the not-quite-right-looking fake female sitting immobile inside its petals a try.

-- from Tongue Orchids’ Sexual Guile: Utterly Convincing. A slave to love, indeed.