botanizing

Talking

At the airport, I am in line for a cup of tea. 

“How you doing?” the man in line ahead of me asks the cashier.

The cashier hesitates. “O.k., I suppose,” he offers.  “My wife is having a baby this summer.”  There is tension in his voice.  He did not have a good night.

“Congratulations,” the man in front of me says to the cashier. 

“After that,” the cashier says, “I’d say my day is really good. Thank you.”  The cashier is now smiling.  “It’s our first child,” he goes on.  “We find out what it is next week.”

Again, I hear some worry in his voice. Is this child to be fish, reptile, or amphibian?  At six months gestation perhaps we are all reptiles.

“I didn’t want to know,” he says.  “My wife did.  Since she’s carrying it for nine months, I guess she gets what she wants.  She doesn’t want anything ambiguous.  No baby wearing yellow—you wouldn’t know what it was.  It’s our first child.  We’ve done everything in order.  Been married five years.  Got a car, a house, then a dog.  Now the baby.”

The cashier’s red hair waves over his head.  He talks fast.  Just to talk, I suppose. 

“Where you going?” he asks me.  Ohio.

“You going home?”  No.

“What you going for?” Invited to speak.

“I’m finishing my degree at [a nearby college].” He has assumed I’m a professor.

“I love my biology classes,” he says  [At the nearby college he attends, one of my former PhD students teaches in the biology department, but I don’t mention this.] 

“Did running start,” he says.  “Did chemistry that way.”  He scrunches his nose—chemistry often doesn’t smell good to biologists.  “It was hard,” he says. “But I like the chemistry that relates to biology. You know, biochemisty and . . .” His voice trails.   

He fits two corrugated sleeves over my tea and hands me the cup.  “Have a good trip and speech,” he says.

I never think about my professional talks as speeches, but the thought stays with me as I fly off to visit Ohio University.

The mass of snow

I think about painters’ concerns with mass.  How should one depict a muscle’s bulk or the weight of breasts?  I am in deep snow and deeper cloud through which snow is falling. The bulky, wet snow makes cold friction, wearying my steps, making each heavy.   

In this cloud, there are no shadows, which are essential to the perception of painterly mass, yet in this forest, in which depth has been fogged, I sense the mass of snow.   This is partly from the displacement of expectation.  It’s the way the boughs of Douglas firs are pendulous.  Their angle of repose is too steep.  I touch a low bough.  Its covering pad of snow leaves only a fringe of deep green needles.  The bough waivers ponderously – cautious, perhaps, of slipping in the snowy air.

High in the Douglas firs, the branches curve downward  under the snow to make question marks.  In a flurry, we have snow queries.  This is now a forest of a thousand questions.  All might ask about the weight of snow.  Bent under the emphasis of snow, a branch might ask when the snow will fall.

It falls. Frosty detritus falling through tree needles is like the clatter of paper. THUNK . . . THunk . . .thunk.  I turn quickly.  A rift in the fog moves uphill, and snow clumps fall upslope.  THUNK is the mass of snow.

Many Times Repeated

Leaf after leaf.  A series of opportunities.  I have been thinking about evolutionary opportunities.  Charles Darwin saw a source of evolutionary opportunity in bodies in which parts were “many times repeated.”  He wrote in the first edition of Origin of Species that:

“We have formerly seen that parts many times repeated are eminently liable to vary in number and structure; consequently it is quite probable that natural selection, during a long-continued course of modification, should have seized on a certain number of the primordially similar elements, many times repeated, and have adapted them to the most diverse purposes.”  (p. 418)

In the spiral stairs of leaves around the artichoke, we see an example of Darwin’s “parts many times repeated.”   These leaves of the artichoke, however, are all alike—little evolutionary opportunity has been taken on the artichoke’s leafy head.  In contrast, flowers demonstrate well the sense of Darwin’s idea.  Orchid flowers often have one petal, the lip, that is highly modified relative to the other petals.  We might even think about the transition in structure from petals to stamens, as in the photograph below of a nasturtium, as an example of modification among ‘parts many times repeated’ in flowers.

These evolutionary opportunities presented when parts are ‘many times repeated’ in the body of plants interest me.   How does evolution go from simple repetition of parts, as we see among the leaves of an artichoke, to the variation and specialization we find along the short length of a flower?