The Wisdom of Plants

On the edge of the forest outside my woodworking shop is a young basswood tree. I visit it once or twice each day, depending on how much coffee I’ve had.

Right at eye level was a bud at the end of a branch. Because most trees extract important nutrients from their leaves before they let them fall, deer can get through the Winter eating the nutrient-rich ends of branches. What falls with the leaves is mostly carbon, which trees can collect from the air, any time they need it.

Throughout the Winter, when I visited the basswood tree I closely observed that particular bud day after day, week after week. There it waited, tightly wrapped, plump, slightly pointed, and indifferent to the freezing weather. It was just waiting, waiting, waiting.

And so it waited as the days grew longer, and warmer, and the snow melted. On warm days I thought I could see a tiny bit of green peek out from the tip of its wrapped-up form. Was I imagining emerging greenery as hope for Spring weather grew?

Days and weeks passed. Finally the emergence of green from the end of the bud was undeniable. For several days the green emerged almost imperceptibly, then more quickly as time passed. With frosty nights nearly ended, a tiny leaf unwrapped from the outgrowth of green. Then another, and another. Growing noticeably each day as the leaves expanded. Five, six, seven leaves, all growing in a row as their branch grew longer. Big basswood leaves, some the size of my hand.

Then, as if by an act of will, the new branch bent upward, toward the sky.

Such realignment of form should not have surprised me. A year earlier, the same young tree was leaning to the point that I had put in a stake to tie it up straight. Before I got around to tying it to the stake, however, by its own volition, it straightened itself. I’d seen that before after the 1998 ice storm. A three-inch diameter tree near my house in Merrickville bent under the weight of accumulated ice, its top freezing solidly to the ground. Lost, I thought. But when the ice melted in Spring, and green energy was flowing again, that tree stood back up, straight, greeting the Sun.

More interesting still is a seedling catalpa tree in our greenhouse. As sometimes happens, it had had trouble getting free of its seed jacket. With some help it was freed up to absorb sunlight. After the cotyledons that came from the seed, it grew two leaves and then from the space between them, another two. Oddly, however, the next stage of growth produced only a single leaf, with no node from which to grow more. That leaf grew larger, but there was no sign of other leaves to come. Then one day, I noticed that that large leaf had bent over, almost horizontal.

It seemed that it was bowing to the minuscule leaf nodes by the earlier leaves, admitting that it could not lead, calling them into action. Not long after that, a tiny bud could be seen at one of the nodes. The big single leaf stood up again. Not straight up, but at a respectful angle, to catch the light, yet making way for the new leading shoot.

The new growth produced two small leaves and then another two. Meanwhile, the stem of that new growth rapidly grew to the girth of the original stem and elongated, making the seedling twice as tall in its mission to catch the Sun.

All in all, the experience has me growing in respect for the agency of plants.

Plants don’t need to move fast. Everything they need comes to them: sunshine is absorbed directly, water and carbon circulate in the air. Other nutrients are absorbed by roots directly from the soil and courtesy of fungal partners that trade trace nutrients for bits of sunshine affixed with carbon.

And they grow robustly. A hundred billion buds on the trees of this forest went through the same expansion that I witnessed on the basswood tree outside my shop. Today, throughout the woodland, there are vast expanses of leaves, nature’s solar collectors, soaking up sunshine and fixing carbon into their woody forms.

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