by Nina Burton
The plants were a different story. They were always among us, for it was in their foliage we found our holiday energy. Trees supported swings and flowers accompanied us to the kitchen table, and we were happy for them to multiply. Before the electrical cables were buried, the gardener had planted various things that were now beginning to show promise. Abutting the steep drop to the north were protective bushes of cinquefoil and lilac, and some honeysuckles were climbing on the south side. While a cultivated raspberry bush was wilting, sweet wild raspberries were spreading up from the public land. It was more or less the same for the grass that was meant to replace the soulless gravel lot. Those blades that reluctantly poked up were joined by mosses, hawkweed, campion and small patches of orpine that were self-seeding and suited this ground.
Like the plants, the animals demonstrated a will of their own. The squirrel feeder we set up was ignored, perhaps as a show of independence. The same went for a little bee hotel that had been installed on the south-facing wall. The wild bees flew sovereignly by, choosing instead to expand the door-frame nest into a window casing. They also had their own ideas about greenery and would, without a doubt, have disdained a monoculture lawn. They were, however, enamoured by the orpine, which was spread eagerly by the bumblebees.
In fact, boring lawns were not to my taste either. In the 18th century they were status symbols in front of palaces, but now they surround every house. In the United States grass lawns take up three times the surface area of all the cornfields in the country. Their upkeep devours billions of dollars, millions of kilos of insecticides, and the better part of their owners’ fresh water.
It was actually liberating that the property preferred to take care of itself. Ever since Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden, their descendants have dreamt of a paradise of their own in which to work by the sweat of their brows. I myself have never been particularly fond of weeding, although I know there can be a lot of love behind keeping a garden. In fact, it was the garden my sister created at her house that enabled her to put down some roots in a new country.
Fruit trees would hardly have thrived in the forest ground of this property, but there were pines, junipers, oaks and birches. The lushest birches were on either side of the cottage, one in front of the door and the other at the north-eastern corner. The corner birch grew so close to the cottage that one branch tried to embrace it, while the roots heaved up a couple of stone slabs. Come autumn, the gardener would probably have to prune it back a bit.
The relationship between tree and house has always been a close one. The timber for walls, floor and ceiling holds memories of trees, and wood can lend a room a snug warmth. In the old days, it was a Swedish tradition to plant a ‘guardian tree’ next to a house so that the roots would suck moisture from the foundation even as the tree’s soul protected the house. Perhaps our birch saw itself as a guardian tree?
In any case, it was around the birch we gathered, for it was next to the veranda. If the weather was warm it was pleasant to sit under the shade of the veranda roof and there was also room for a large table. When my sister arrived with her youngest children and grandchildren, three generations managed to squeeze around it, and since there were only three walls to the veranda, nature could join in on the action.
Now and then it even gently honed in on what we were doing. Previously, the kids’ older cousins had been playing with snails. Now these children found a grasshopper they named Ferdinand, and it temporarily resided in a moss-lined bowl. At this point, I recalled that my sister had once told stories about an ant with the same name. And one of her sons shared her ability to make up stories. My favourite was about a troll who was so slow that it seemed a little dumb, but as soon as it placed its hands on the moss it was given the answer to any question, because the moss had been around since the beginning of life on Earth. I thought it was a very clever troll, to understand that plants have things to tell us.
A lot came back to me on that veranda. Games came out in the evenings, just as they had when my sister and I were little, and during one game of Memory I had a sense of déjà vu. Everything started over again, in new versions and new generations. It felt rather like the way trees form year rings as they put out new shoots.
Each spring, trees revisit their magic trick of turning sun and water into foliage, and yet I am just as astounded every time. When even the venerable pines are full of spring feelings, they spread pollen everywhere. I’d heard that a hundred million grains of pollen would powder only a single square metre, and I didn’t doubt it. Even those grains that landed on the roof and windowsills radiated a belief in the future.
Yet it seemed to me the most eager spring fever was that of the birches. I understood why they were associated with the Norse goddess of fertility, Freyja, for birch sap is said to be rich in energy, and the leaves are tied to the old fertility rites of Midsummer, which marked the end of the spring carnival. It began with leaves like little sequins, and when the sloe blossoms were frothy as a boat’s wake, the present and imperfect lived a double life. It was now, and it was a moment ago. Soon the foliage would darken in the light.
Plants know all about the relativity and enormity of time. They can pack it into tiny seeds and make it last forever. They have been incessantly wilting and reborn during a hundred million years, and they still represent 99 per cent of the biomass on Earth. These proportions made me ponder. They meant that we humans, along with all other creatures, make up only a mere fraction of life. There could be no doubt that our planet belongs first and foremost to the plant kingdom.
Plants are also part of most things around us, whether they’ve been transformed into walls or heat, clothing fibres or tools, medicine or paint – and above all, they are behind everything we eat and drink, since meat animals too live on plants or plant-eaters. Moreover, every breath we take is full of the oxygen they produce. If there’s anything we should try to understand, it’s plants.
I had begun by seeking out their personalities and shapes with the help of names. Even among the grasses I discovered a world bursting with diversity. It was at once fragile and so robust that a red fescue plant can live for a thousand years. To ants they must be like forests: the tufted grass their pines, the quaking-grass their aspens and the colonial bentgrass their birches.
Also living on the ground were those seeds that were the result of the springtime rendezvous between pollen and pistils. I was moved by the parental care given to them by plants – before tiny seeds are released into the world, they receive both provisions and instructions for handling a number of situations. Biologist Thor Hanson had filled an entire book with the adventures that awaited seeds.
The nourishment with which they are supplied is, of course, desirable to many animals, but this is part of the plan as well. Some seeds, like nuts, have hard shells, and others have an off-putting taste or contain a toxic element. All seeds must also have the ability to travel. Some are embedded in sweet berries or fruits, the better to be transported in animal bellies and deposited in a pile of fertiliser. Others are equipped with tiny hooks so they can hitch a ride on an animal’s fur or a bird’s feathers. But most seeds have their own wings, propellers or parachutes. In this way, trees have at least a memory of flight.
While most seeds don’t go far from their parent plant, the wind carries some a long way. Seeds have been found high above the treeline in the Himalayas, and among those that are carried on water, the fluffy bolls of the cotton plant have made it all the way across the Atlantic.
Then comes the opposite of flight: stillness, the ability to wait. For what is a seed but a vessel for the future? When the British Museum was bombed in the Second World War, rain fell through the ceiling and suddenly some three-hundred-year-old seeds began to sprout from their herbarium page. Their parents had lived in a different time and a different part of the world, but the seeds themselves were open to new possibilities. Centuries can be mere instants to seeds. They have even
sprouted after spending thousands of years in an Egyptian grave.
During their Sleeping Beauty phase, they aren’t entirely unaware of what’s going on around them. They wait for signals that indicate good conditions. From within their tiny world they even seem to tell seasons, for they can awaken during fires as if responding to a spring-like warmth.
Seeds appeared to be shrouded in so many mysteries. How could they sense light and darkness, heat and moisture? How did they know so much about the Earth and about time? How did they figure out what their embryonic leaves and roots should do once the time was right? Indeed, how could the experience from millions of years be packed into such a tiny seed?
Strictly speaking, it was thanks to the seed’s ability to wait that we were sitting in a cottage, eating bread. The seeds enabled our forefathers to become farmers who planned crops and had permanent homes. As gatherers they had lived hand to mouth, and even as settlers they seemed to have eaten soundly of everything they found. The food in an early Syrian settlement was shown to consist of 250 different kinds of plants, for they lived in an expansive green pantry. It’s still there, for those who seek it out, and when I found a cookbook for foragers I took the opportunity to try it out with my sister during one summer holiday. Curious, I made creamed orpine, lamb’s-quarters patties and pancakes with yellow bedstraw in the batter. So handy to have food right outside the door! My nephews ate it all with a mixture of fear and wonder, sneaking suspicious glances at me. Could you really eat this stuff? Their scepticism grew when I informed them that macaroni and wheat buns are also made of a type of grass, and when I said that candy actually comes from sugarcane plants that grow three metres high, they thought it was a tall tale.
Certain species of grass certainly had taken over the ancient farmers’ diets. And as a result the plants were transformed, becoming as rooted as the settlers. As such, people began to claim property and adorn it with new plants. Meanwhile, the number of plants people ate began to shrink, until at last it mostly consisted of cereals, chickpeas and lentils.
Oddly enough, the same pattern appeared in different civilisations. Barley, wheat and rye began to be cultivated in the fertile crescent of the Middle East ten thousand years ago. Around the same time, rice was sown in China and maize in the Americas, and in Africa durra and millet were all the rage. In the end, 70 per cent of all cultivated land was devoted to grasses like rice, barley, corn and wheat. Genetically modified wheat brought even better harvests, although it also took more pesticides and artificial fertilisers to grow.
But seeds weren’t only to be found in cereals. Others became spices and medicines. The strong flavours and toxins that were meant as protection against insects became extremely sought after among humans, because proportion is everything. In India, spices were used both in food and in Ayurvedic medicine, and they were similarly cherished in Mesopotamia and China. Then their triumphal march continued into Europe. In ancient Greece, taxes could be paid in black pepper, and in the Roman Empire, nutmeg was used as currency. And as a new era dawned, ships began to search the world around for even more spices. Columbus crossed the Atlantic to find new paths to them, and Vasco da Gama sought a better passage to the spice islands of the Indian Ocean. The hunt was on not only for flavourful seeds but for the saffron of crocuses, the vanilla pods of orchids and the bark of cinnamon trees. The Dutch East India Company made such profits off the spice trade that it would be comparable to today’s oil industry. Even the newly discovered plants of South America would turn out to be worth more than the gold of the Indian territory, although people were initially sceptical of potatoes, strawberries, tomatoes and maize.
Rare flowers soon became equally sought after, which is how speculation on Turkish tulips led to a stock market crash in Holland. In certain places, too, the cultivation of exotic plants became linked to the increasingly lucrative slave trade. Africans were called wild savages, and what was wild could be treated with impunity. Thus, both enslaved people and plants were transported to plantations on the other side of the ocean. Though sugarcane is a grass with razor-sharp leaves, it eventually became the world’s most popular crop. Equally successful was the cotton plant, which is actually related to hibiscus. In Mexico and South America it had been cultivated by the Aztecs and the Inca, and in Europe the cotton plants Alexander the Great brought back from India spread along the Mediterranean. But it was a novelty in the southern states of North America, and with the forced labour of enslaved people it became the world’s first mass-produced material.
The aftermath of this great plant migration was still apparent where we sat on the veranda. Turkish lilacs flourished nearby, and there was cotton cellulose not only in our clothing but in ice cream, margarine, chewing gum and makeup. Like billions of others, we enjoyed our daily coffee, which is now one of the leading goods on the global market. As is also the case with tea, chocolate and tobacco, the wealth accumulates not where the plants are grown but somewhere else, and the coffee requires so much water that it takes 140 litres to make a single cup.
Plants can have peculiar links to history and culture. Caffeine causes the neurons of our brains to react faster, so it’s said that coffee paved the way for the Enlightenment. Voltaire and Diderot, at least, drank around forty cups a day at cafés where the discussions were as sober as they were lively. Today, every Swedish employer is more than happy to provide coffee in the workplace.
In fact, caffeine is the plant’s protection against insects, and a spider that lands in a cup of coffee will weave strange webs. But nothing is an absolute, and even coffee bushes need pollinators, so small doses of caffeine can attract certain bees without scaring them off. I imagined that they needed perking up after their industrious work.
The exotic plants I’d spent the most time with were houseplants. Plants brought indoors are like quiet pets, and sometimes they show us how they lived in their homelands. Geraniums, for instance, are used to African drought, while Christmas cactuses blossom more or less as they do in Brazil. The prayer plant comes from the same area, and closes its beautiful leaves at the time when Brazilian night begins to fall.
But most of our trees have domestic roots, and they often seem to lend a sense of belonging to a place. Just as Carl Linnaeus’s name stemmed from a linden tree on his family farm, whole forests of other trees have cropped up among Swedish surnames. We have Björk and Ek, Lind and Hägg, Rönnblom and Lönnblad, Hasselgren and Almkvist, Alström and Asplund, Furuland and Grankvist. That is to say, Birch and Oak, Linden and Bird-cherry, Rowan-flower and Maple-leaf, Hazel-branch and Elm-twig, Alder-stream and Aspen-grove, Pine-land and Spruce-twig. Perhaps having a tree name was a way of anchoring oneself. Could there be a similar purpose behind the concept of the guardian tree?
My own extended family, of course, had deeper roots. Although the family was spread out, it felt nice to share memories and traits within it. The family tree I tried to draw for the youngest members was rather limited, since its branches soon became tangled. It extended over half a dozen countries, so the roots were sprawling, and a hundred years back there were thousands of connections. A tree depicting our biological evolution would be even trickier to draw, since in that case we were merely a species in a genus in a family in an order in a class in a phylum in a kingdom in a domain of the big family of Earth.
Still, heredity is part of identity. At the same time it’s open to change, for even if a cowslip will never be a rose, there is interplay between genetic traits and the environment. How these variations actually surfaced remained a great mystery until the middle of the 19th century, when a man began to plant peas to figure it out once and for all.
Cultivation wasn’t actually what Gregor Mendel intended to devote his time to, even though his family had a small farm. What interested him were questions about life. Thanks to scholarships and income from private lessons he was able to study philosophy, physics and mathematics, but it took a fortune or a patron to be able to conduct research.
Mendel had neither. His professor therefore advised him to apply to an Augustine monastery that supported scientific study.
Monasteries had been cultivating medicinal plants since the Middle Ages, and when Mendel was given a teaching position he was also allowed to take a few university courses. Thanks to these and a microscope, he was able to tackle the question he was struggling with.
Farmers had long been cross-breeding different species without understanding how their genes transferred, and Linnaeus’s classification system left no room for crosses or hybrids. So Mendel wanted to get to the bottom of it by way of experiments. He tried using bees at first, but this was a failure, since bees mate in the air and have fairly peculiar genetics. His attempts with different-coloured mice were more promising, but the abbot didn’t approve. Mice have never been welcome creatures, and their habit of multiplying was far too bestial for a monastery.
Plants were a different story. A side benefit of peas was that they produced food for the kitchen, so Mendel was given a greenhouse of his own in the monastery gardens. There, undisturbed, he could matchmake his friends in their flowerbeds, and in eight years he managed to pollinate more than ten thousand pea plants with a tiny paintbrush. He crossed green peas with yellow, wrinkly ones with smooth, white-blossomed ones with violet, and tall ones with short, and thanks to his mathematical training he was able to keep tables of what he found. But he was surprised at the results. When he paired tall plants with short ones, the result wasn’t medium-height plants but tall ones; and a cross between white- and violet-blossomed peas gave only white blossoms. Traits that didn’t appear in the first generation might show up later, however, so they seemed to be there all along, if hidden. Just as there were two parents, the dominant and recessive genes must come in pairs.
Mendel published his tables in a local scientific journal and sent one of the hundred or so copies to Darwin. He’d read a German translation of Darwin’s theory of evolution and had taken detailed notes. But the copy he sent to Darwin would always remain unopened, and interest remained low among Mendel’s other contemporaries as well. Compared with Darwin’s theories of our animal forefathers, Mendel’s pea tables were really quite boring. Thus his findings, like seeds, had to await a new era and only emerged into the light after his death.