Spring!

It’s Spring!  We’re all a bit giddy with the restorative powers of crocuses, snowdrops and all those other delightful little nubbins poking up through the soil.   Spring is here, green is everyone’s favorite color, and we’re all in love with plants, regeneration, and growth.

But what’s really going on out there?  Nicholas Harberd tells all in Seed to Seed: the Secret Life of Plants.  All, that is, for one little weed growing in a country churchyard in England.  Haberd is a plant biologist and for one year he kept a diary of the events in the life of a single plant, thale-cress or Arabidopsis thaliana.  The result is a fairly painless introduction to plant genetics that is surprisingly full of “wow” moments as 30,000 genes rally to the myriad challenges in the life of a rather non-descript weed.

Plants don’t have brains,
but each one is a complex system able to respond appropriately to diverse situations in the environment.  Even something as seemingly simple as the growth of a root is revealed to be the product of an intricate chain of signals and “corrections” as the root “feels” its way through the soil and its obstructions.  

I found this fascinating, so much so that I bought my own copy of the book.  However, there is a lot of hard science here and Haberd is a straightforward writer rather than a riveting one.  Those who prefer a little more pizzazz with their botany might prefer William C. Burger’s Flowers: How They Changed the World. 

Burger is curator emeritus of the Department of Botany at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.  He looks at the big picture – the astonishing adaptation and diversity of the 226,000 identified flowering plant species in the world and their importance to us.  Ranging through time and across the globe, Burger has an easy style and his love of the topic is infectious and charming.   I bought this book for myself as well.

Amy Stewart focuses on plant adaptations that are not so pretty (or maybe too pretty) in her new book, Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Abraham Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities.  Stewart is entertaining but deadly serious in her expose of plant survival schemes.  Poisonous plants abound, as all mystery readers know, but that’s just the beginning.  Deceitful, stinky, prickly, smothering, voracious – there are all manner of villains in the plant world and there’s probably at least one biding its time in your backyard right now.

Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind by Henry Hobhouse, and, An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World by Toby & Will Musgrave are two works that examine the socio-economic importance of plants and their impact on world history.  Hobhouse’s book came out in 1986 and has become something of a minor classic.  As he says in his introduction, history is full of the exploits of men and women; he suggests a different perspective: “Nature can halt our progress and nature can advance it.”  His five plants have done both.

Hobhouse has a bit of an attitude; his work is sometimes compared to Howard Zinn’s People’s Histories.  Others suspect that his attitude may sometimes color his history.  Toby & Will Musgrave, though, have impeccable credentials as historians; they accept four of Hobhouse’s plants and add another three.  An Empire of Plants is very elegantly presented and beautifully illustrated.   Both books offer compelling tales of economic and botanic exploitation.

Have you guessed the plants?  For Hobhouse, they are quinine, sugar, tea, cotton, and the potato.  The Musgraves drop the potato and add tobacco, opium, and rubber.   Michael Pollan picks the potato back up in his The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the World where he examines what he believes is a reciprocal relationship that has developed between humans and their cultivated plants.  Potatoes, tulips, marijuana, and apples fuel his argument that human and plant destinies are inextricably intertwined.

Crocuses and snowdrops:  Who knew?

--The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours--

Loren Eiseley