by Nina Burton
Perhaps the emotional root of our sense of smell can also explain why so many things are expressed through flowers. Bouquets are used everywhere from birthday celebrations to graves, and there are even flower-language books to explain to couples in love exactly which emotion can be expressed by which species. This was a dodge by the Victorians, who preferred to use flowers as euphemisms instead of mentioning what they and bees did together. Anyhow, it illustrated how flowers have helped us with our expressions.
And it’s not just about emotions. Although our eyes can see millions of shades of colour, we can only talk about the handful that have been given names – so here, too, flowers have come to our aid. The name ‘rosy’ comes from the rose, and the fruit called orange gave us the colour name; ‘violet’ comes from violets, and ‘lavender’ from the flower. An archaic word for another floral shade of purple, gridelin, comes from French gris de lin, or, ‘the grey of flax’. With the advent of this word a sudden brightening of the palette also arrived, because earlier that shade of colour was called brown in some places.
In fact, colours and scents speak to us as powerfully as they do to bees, but talking about them is another story, and it’s even more difficult to bring them to life. Written words have been carried forth on dead plants – on dried papyrus grass in Egypt, and on cut slices of beechwood in Scandinavia. Since then, billions of words have been transmitted on paper made from pulped trees. Together they must create something greater, as when bees make honey from blossoms, for the result is meant to convey an essence of life that will last into the future.
Was this perhaps the point at which literature intersects biology? After all, ‘culture’ does mean ‘cultivation’. And ideas can certainly be cross-pollinated just like plants, and new branches grafted to them like fruit trees. Overcomplicated sentences can be weeded like flowerbeds to reach a more organic rhythm, and words can be transplanted into other languages or give rise to new hybrids. Many can branch off into flowery associations, and together they bring scent and shadow to a written world.
When I thought about it, literature and the art of gardening seemed to have many points of contact. No one can compete with nature, but we, too, can give time and care to the expressions that strive to spring forth. So it wasn’t just the tradesmen I felt a kinship with. I also had an affinity for the gardener.
The days of holiday with my family were intense even in their timelessness, and afterwards it truly felt as if time had been packed into a seed loaded with growing power. Memories can, just like foliage, have a long reach, so they would linger even when everything they touched upon was gone.
The younger generations had continued their holidaying at the cottage while I was elsewhere. When I returned to meet the gardener, shadows were growing among blueberries in the forest. But there was also a bigger change afoot. Wells in the neighbourhood had begun to run dry during the summer drought, and almost all the birches on the property had died. Their leaves had fallen in August, never to return.
I recalled how the fate of Yggdrasil was described in the Edda and felt dejected. There, the snake Nidhogg had chewed its way ever deeper into its root, and the water in Mímer’s well, which nourished the second root, slowly began to sour. At last only the third root remained, where the Norns spun, plied and cut the thread of life. They were worried when they saw the leaves yellowing on the branches, but the people of Midgard continued to live life as they had before, until the tree was felled by a storm and the water came rushing in. The gods had abandoned the World Tree to a fire that made the sky burn red.
As I walked around the house, I found that at least the birch at the corner had survived the drought, perhaps because its roots ran deeper. It must have sensed what had happened to the other birches on the property, since they were family, and trees can communicate. On the other side of the house stood the dry skeleton of its sister birch, a sad, eye-catching sight in front of the door. This was where I had hung a swinging birdhouse that first spring. The tree was always full of birds, and in June I had seen a sparrowhawk dive into the branches to take a blue tit as easily as if it were picking a piece of fruit. It was a painful sight, but the tree welcomed all birds.
And couldn’t even the most luxurious blossom hint at the fact that death is part of life? In the spring scent of lilacs one ingredient, the organic compound indole, is created from putrefaction. The same double nature is present in the summer constellations of umbelliferous plants. On the one hand they include parsley, parsnip, cumin and chervil, which give us flavour and healing; on the other hand, poison hemlock: death in the pot. They’re all part of the same family and can only be differentiated by features of the stem, leaf, fruit, root, flowering period and habitat. Between life and death there is a strange relation, like the right side and wrong side in a piece of knitting. Half of the species in a forest live on dead trees, and plants take nutrition through the process of decomposition that creates soil. Yet the constituent parts always remain. They are indications that the fertility of the Earth was born in an interplay between all living things.
When I had raked up the dead leaves on the ground and brought them to the compost pile it almost seemed to be the most active corner of the property. Down in the humus was a landscape as varied as the one I could see around me. Pollen mingled with ground-down bedrock, bacteria and countless other minuscule organisms. Somewhere in the forests of fungal mycelia were the love nests of springtails. Somewhere a beetle was finding its dinner and a millipede was eating a woodlouse. It was a teeming, often nameless life, for only a fraction of underground species are known. Yet all together, they’re the ones who create the ground itself. The ancient Greeks considered the earth an element, but it is a fluid collaboration of water, air, particles and innumerable miniature lives.
I dug up a shovelful of compost and took a look at it. There were probably millions of bacteria there, a hundred thousand microscopic worms, and perhaps twenty thousand mites among various fungi and algae. These billions of voracious eaters would transform decaying material into food for foliage. They ate and drank as if at a giant banquet. Yeasts that could give us beer and wine, cheese and bread were now turning the sugar in leaf litter into alcohol, which bacteria gulped down so they could give acetic acid to others. It was combustion as strong as a flame on a candle, and it made everything go around like the world itself, so that the end of one story could be the beginning of another.
Dealing with the compost I got a tiny cut on my hand, so to be safe I went inside to clean it out. Bacteria are stealthy. Since their vast number of species have divided the world among them, the ones that nourish plants can be fatal to us.
So many remarkable things happen in the world of microbes. It’s not just that different types of soil have their own specific array. All of them are waging a silent war against fungi, which defend themselves with a sort of antibiotic weapon. It seems that without knowing anything about the battle between bacteria and fungi, people in ancient Egypt covered wounds with a mash made of mould, so perhaps they had stumbled across its positive effects. When the connection became clear in the 20th century, it was still by sheer coincidence. Alexander Fleming forgot a dish of bacteria in his warm laboratory, and when he found it had been invaded by mould he understood the significance.
As a child I had been a battleground in the war between bacteria and fungi. One overzealous doctor wanted to cure my recurring infections once and for all by giving me a massive dose of antibiotics. He said it would kill all the bacteria, and I suppose in some ways it was a success. I suddenly became indescribably exhausted and allergic to just about everything. We had dogs at the time, and taking them on walks in the woods became torture because it seemed I could no longer tolerate plants or animals. But I didn’t want to live in a sterile environment, so at last my mother took me to a naturopath, who made my allergies disappear. Perhaps the balance between fungi and bacteria was restored as I got stronger. I remember that the cure involved, among o
ther things, pollen dragées.
Only later it was discovered that all the bacteria in a body together would weigh as much as a brain, and that they, in their own way, are just as important. Some types train the immune system, some bring out enzymes or vitamins and free nutrients; some keep foreign bacteria on the skin in check; some send neurotransmitters to the brain, suggesting that they may play a part in depression, autism and ADHD, among other things. Indeed, we humans harbour entire ecosystems of bacteria, and they’re all necessary in the proper locations and proportions. Based solely on our billions of bacteria cells, we could almost be classified among them.
And it’s not just that there are so many of them. They are full of incredible vigour. A bacterium that spent 250 million years inside a salt crystal came to life with a bit of moisture and soon began to multiply. Multiplication is child’s play for bacteria. Since they divide every twenty minutes, they propagate as incessantly as they die. They can freely move towards nutritional sources, and they can sense changes in light, temperature, chemistry and magnetic fields. They can also exchange both molecules and DNA with one another, and, like ants, they can create vast networks. To boot, they’re found in all living things on Earth, for there are reasons we can coexist. We have a common origin, in our oceanic past.
The early role of bacteria in evolution was discovered quite recently. In the 1960s, young biologist Lynn Margulis had a hypothesis about their importance, but at the time she was only considered a bizarre rebel, because she was going against the usual interpretation of evolutionary theory. That interpretation described evolution as a battle, but to her it seemed more about complementing than about competition. Perhaps natural selection could winnow, but it couldn’t create something new. Cooperation could, however, create, because to add gave more than to take away. What’s more, the survivors were most often those who had adapted to the world around them, and the world around them meant other kinds of life. To put it simply, everyone depended on everyone else. It wasn’t as if the Earth housed eight million species for the sole purpose of benefiting a single one of them.
Margulis also found it misleading that zoologists illustrated evolution with animals. The animal kingdom was a recent arrival to life, so she looked back at the first cells of the primordial ocean. Even there, she saw signs of symbiosis. Her hypothesis was that bacteria had, at one point early on in life, made their way into other cells, where they became a sort of powerhouse. It seemed probable that this was how life was able to increase its diversity. In time, her theory would be corroborated by genetic studies, and she would come to be called one of the most prominent researchers of modern biology.
But it took some time for her to get anyone’s attention. Having bacteria in the family tree was even worse than being descended from apes, and the article in which she presented her thesis was firmly rejected by fifteen scientific journals. Yet she continued her research undaunted.
She had noticed, for instance, that bacteria produce gases and suspected that this had affected the atmosphere. Since she was married to astrophysicist Carl Sagan, she knew that microscopic and astronomic perspectives can be reconciled. And she knew that her theories were shared by biochemist James Lovelock, who worked for NASA.
Lovelock had compared the Earth’s atmosphere with those of Mars and Venus, and from the differences he had drawn an essential conclusion: the origin of our atmosphere is biological. It seems to have been created by the living organisms on Earth, which appear to regulate it still. The atmosphere – what we call the sky – is, like the soil, a creation of everything that has lived on Earth and is, therefore, unique.
In a sense, it had become easier to see the Earth from space than from the limited perspective afforded from the ground. The first astronauts were amazed at our shimmering, blue-and-green little pearl. They could see how rain and wind moved freely around it, for there were no borders, only transitional spaces, like between a mountain and a valley.
When Margulis and Lovelock combined their knowledge, the very smallest and the very biggest perspectives engaged one another – and that was telling. They discovered an interplay that reached from the cells to the atmosphere, with constant loops of feedback. It was like a woven fabric in which plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms were interdependent. Evolution was not a ladder moving towards something better, and the new was not more robust than the old. The very bacteria that were first on the scene would, without a doubt, out-survive everything else.
So what should this hypothesis be called? Lovelock liked to take long walks with his neighbour, author William Golding. Golding would later receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, but as a young man he had also studied the natural sciences. When Lovelock told him of the hypothesis that emerged from his collaboration with Margulis, Golding was enraptured. Why not name it after the old Earth goddess Gaia? Her Greek name was also Ge, as in ‘geology’ and ‘geography’. The fact that Golding, as a novelist, was accustomed to a main character driving the action probably played a part here. In the Greek pantheon, Gaia was the goddess of the Earth, mothering and fertility, and since it’s easy to assign some human traits to gods, this could promote understanding of the concept. Lovelock, a romanticist, accepted Golding’s suggestion, and thus the Gaia Hypothesis got its name.
But Lynn Margulis was never satisfied with it. The goddess Gaia was a metaphor that led to faulty associations. The hypothesis had nothing to do with any single source of power – quite the opposite, it was about a flexible interplay between all the organisms on Earth, from bacteria to plants and animals. It was tempting to see some human traits behind whatever guided life on Earth, but this theory was about the reverse.
Margulis’s scepticism turned out to be warranted. Because of its name, the Gaia Hypothesis came to be associated with occult, New Age fantasies. It was also interpreted as a feminine principle, so in the same spirit Margulis herself would be termed ‘science’s unruly earth mother’, more or less like a modern Gaia. The central idea of the hypothesis – the link between all life on Earth – instead came to be tied to a different name. Aristotle, after all, had compared the connections on Earth to a joint household, and the Greek word for house brought us the term ‘ecology’. It was first used by biologist Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century, and it began to be used more generally in conjunction with the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1960s.
As for Lovelock’s and Margulis’s theory, it came to enjoy support in most scientific circles with time, but the Gaia name was studiously avoided. Today it’s more common to talk about geophysiology or ‘Earth System Science’, and the interactions of Earth are illustrated with a technical image: it’s compared to interconnected computers. This was also the way Stefano Mancuso explained the linked intelligences of ants and plants. Big or small – it’s all about networks.
When I was done with the compost, I sat down on the veranda and pondered all the different depictions of Earth’s interplay. A net suggests both strength and vulnerability, since each individual loop is important. It’s more than just a common thread, for in the soil threads become mycelia like those beneath the trees. And when I looked at the birch at the corner of the cottage, I thought that even the old World Tree was a valid symbol. Unlike goddesses, houses and computers, a tree is an actual living thing on Earth. The bark of the birch was wrinkled like elderly skin, and yet I knew that the buds of spring were lying in wait in its twigs. They all shared one trunk, even though the tree was a genetic mosaic with cascades of possibilities. It was only through its very diversity that the tree could live. Each part was perfect in its own way, for even if life is profligate, nothing is meaningless.
The family tree I had drawn for the little ones over the summer was meant to encompass our family. But where was the line that separated us from all else? In a much broader family tree, researchers by now had found the smallest common denominator for all life on Earth. It was a sprawling congregation that extended from microbes to plants to
animals. This origin was called LUCA, for Last Universal Common Ancestor. Perhaps LUCA had arisen in multiple places, but it was, in any case, a primordial cell.
My eyes swept across the birch, the blue tits and the sparkling sound that was their backdrop. If LUCA had descendants in all living things, the cells in my body must be related to those in other beings, so apparently I had family members all over the property. Even though we looked nothing alike, we had our innermost parts in common.
It seemed inconceivable that cells could build such diverse organisms. But the secret, of course, lies in the genetic alphabet that constantly creates new worlds, more or less the way letters and books do. Some million genes inside me are proof of that. One of them contained the blueprints for my nervous system and is also found in insects and worms. And that’s not all. I also share genes with trees and lilies.
Naturally, the property was home to only a selection of all life on Earth. I had got a broader overview in a museum of natural history that claimed to show the breadth of life in a segment. It started with the Big Bang, majestically projected onto the dome of the movie room, and as all the elements were formed, a sky teeming with stars unfurled. Zooming in on newborn Earth, volcanic eruptions flared under meteor showers. Then came the glowing red Earth, followed by the Earth black with lava and the Earth white with frost, before the green Earth began to flourish with life.
I walked on through halls of minerals, patterned with time or squeezed into gems. I saw the impressions of fossils among bones of cephalopods and skulls of ancestors. I passed caravans of animals, extinct or merely dead. When I reached an expressionlessly staring badger I hurried to a room where butterflies had been pinned up like vanished moments. Under them, beetles formed shimmering armies, and other displays glowed with the feathery suits of birds, preserved with arsenic. A famous herbarium sagged under the weight of its dried rarities.