Green Seduction

A World of Plants Awaits

Some people fall prey to the dark side. Me, I fell prey to the green side, long ago when I was seduced by plants. One of my earliest memories of Seattle is when we moved into our new house and I got to choose my bedroom. I picked the one that had a vine growing into the window. I have no clue what the vine was and I have no recollection of the vine ever entering my window again but I do know that I made the right choice in bedrooms. I also have another distant recollection from that time, of seeing a cactus in bloom at the Volunteer Park Conservatory. What a weird plant and flower for a young boy in the Pacific Northwest to see. Is that part of what drew me to the desert southwest many years later?

When I did eventually move to Moab, Utah, geology is what initially drew my attention, but over the years I became more and more enchanted with the flora. It was always a pleasure to see the first green leaves and first flower of spring; to discover the tenacity of life in hanging gardens and pygmy forests; to learn new names, such as bastard toadflax, puccoon, and false mockorange (which should be an orange with that double negative construction, but sadly isn’t); and to see cacti blooming in their native habitat. (I still thrill to see blooming cactus plants.)

Encouraged by the many times I succumbed to greenery, I allowed myself once again to be seduced by a plant in my urban life when my wife and I were shopping for a house in Seattle. As I have written before, the three ginormous Douglas firs in the backyard were central to our decision to buy the house where we still live, still graced by the trees, as well as a 60-foot-tall Doug fir, that decided to grow in the front yard.

My reminiscences of my past floral seductions were prompted by rereading David Rains Wallace’s The Klamath Knot. I first read the book in college when it came out (there’s even a piece of paper in the book with notes from what looks like an Intro to Geo course). It’s a splendid homage to place exploring plants and animals, geology, and evolution and still interesting 40 years after my first encounter.

Late in the book, Wallace compares plants and animals in regard to evolution. After noting that his little Golden Guide to fossils gives short shrift to information about plants, he writes: “In a truly progressive view of evolution, however, plants would be given the greater emphasis because they are the leaders. They always adapt to new climates, new soils, new terrain before animals do.”

What further makes Wallace’s observation fascinating is that plants are planetary newcomers, only moving onto land about 400 million years ago, which means they have only been doing their thing for the last ten percent of Earth’s history. But what a thing they have been doing. Plants enabled the development of soils, reduced atmospheric CO₂, and increased O₂, ultimately creating the planetary atmosphere we have evolved to know and love.

I hadn’t thought of plants that way, as the colonizers that create, and created, the paths for animals to follow. I have regularly seen this in our yard and around Seattle. Wherever there are plants, animals abound, whether they are the many critters I have encountered in our big, backyard Dougs, beavers in the city’s many parks, or stumps riddled with woodpeckers holes. And, I have seen many locations, such as the soft estate (as the Brits call them) ecosystems along highways, building ledges dotted with plants, or roof tops overtaken by mosses, where plants are exploiting new niches that will attract new animals.

Plants, dang, they grow in the most unlikely places, adding their grace to our world.

Not only are plants seducers and colonizers, they are also a gateway and one of the easiest ways for city dwellers to interact with the natural world. Wildflowers and shrubs and trees and their verdurous partners are always around us, whether in our homes, our yards, or public parks, allowing us to see how they live and die, how other animals interact with them, and how they affect our moods. I cannot count the number of times that I have gone into our backyard or simply strolled our neighborhood and been comforted by the vegetation or entranced by the animals making use of the floral habitat. Wow, they are almost as cool as rocks!

It’s not too much to say that we, and nearly every other terrestrial being, owe our existence to plants. And, to think, that all one has to do to find these astounding forms of life is look around us, particularly in a city as resplendent with plants as Seattle.

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One final, rather disturbing point, which I was reminded of while rereading Robert McFarlane’s amazing book Landmarks. In it he laments that the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary decided to cut out words such as acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, cowslip, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, ivy, mistletoe, and willow and replace them with blog, committee, and voice-mail. Responding to criticism, the editor said that they were merely reflecting a changed environment, physically and culturally. McFarlane writes that “what is lost along with this literacy is something precious: a kind of word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place.”

Amen, to that. I sincerely hope that such language is never lost and that we will continue to have the opportunity to find that enchantment not just in the words but also in the plants around us.