Plant man

“ Upon the soil the plant grows. What a wonder and a mystery is the plant! A living, and growing, and breathing existence, that speaks silently to the eye, and to the sense of touch, and to the sense of smell—speaks kindly to man, and soothingly, and appeals to his reasoning powers—but is mute to the most open and wakeful of all his senses, and by no verbal speech reveals the secrets with which its full vessels are bursting. ”

“ These effects of changes of circumstances are so well known that botanists prefer not to describe garden plants, at least only those which have been newly cultivated.
“Is not cultivated wheat (Triticum sativum) only a plant brought by man into the condition in which we actually see it? Who can tell me in what country such a plant lives in a state of nature—that is to say, without being there the result of its culture in some neighboring region? ”

“ The idea of vegetation is irresistible in considering mental activity. Man seems a higher plant. What happens here in mankind is matched by what happens out there in the history of grass and wheat. This curious resemblance repeats, in the mental function, the germination, growth, state of melioration, crossings, blight, parasites, and in short all the accidents of the plant. Under every leaf is the bud of a new leaf, and not less under every thought is a newer thought. The plant absorbs much nourishment from the ground in order to repair its own waste by exhalation, and keep itself good. ”

“ Grafting does it not, that mendeth the fruit or doubleth the flowers, etc., but hath not the power to make a new kind, for the scion ever overruleth the stock." In which last observation he shows more knowledge and a deeper insight into the hidden mysteries of plant-life than many a man in our day, whose special business it is to watch, nurse, and care for these humble forms of existence. ”

“ Now stop a moment and think of the almost wicked intelligence this plant has seemed to show,—how it keeps its hold of the earth till its stem has found the plant which will be compelled to feed it, and how it gives up all pretense of self-support, once it has captured its prey. ”

“ But man does not really produce them. Such peculiarities—often surprising enough—now and then originate, we know not how (the plant sports, as the gardeners say) ; they are only preserved, propagated, and generally further developed, by the cultivator's skilful care. If left alone, they are likely to dwindle and perish, or else revert to the original form of the species. Vegetable races are commonly annuals, which can be kept up only by seed, or herbs of which a succession of generations can be had every year or two, and so the education by selection be completed without great lapse of time. ”

“ Are we not all wrong in adopting one degree, so to say, of plant life as the only fitting one to lay before the house? Is it well to devote the flower-bed to one type of vegetation only—low herbaceous vegetation—be that hardy or tender?... We have been so long accustomed to leave flower-beds raw, and to put a number of plants out every year, forming flat surfaces of colour, that no one even thinks of the higher and better way of filling them. ”

“ There are botanists among them, equally familiar with either the Linnaean or the Natural system, who know the name and habitat of every plant within a day's walk from their dwellings; who steal the holiday of a day or two when any particular plant should be in flower, and tying up their simple food in their pocket-handkerchiefs, set off with single purpose to fetch home the humble-looking weed. ”

“ So far from being uniform, and unmarked by anything active, the lives of plants are full from beginning to end of the most curious and diversified phenomena. Not that they act knowingly, exercising consciousness and volition,—this has been the dream only of a few enthusiasts,—but taking one plant with another, the history of vegetable life is quite a romance, and scarcely inferior in wonderful circumstance to that of animals. ”

“ From the architecture of their outer characteristics, which takes up the first chapter, we have gone step by step into the story of what goes on within the plant, and how it reproduces its kind. These actions or behavior of plants have resulted in many things of great practical importance as well as being of absorbing interest in themselves. What some of these results have been, we see reflected in the uses of plants to man, in the history of their development, and, most of all, in the way they are distributed over the earth to-day. ”

“ Plant has added a temperate life and great moderation in the use of stimulants.{105} While a man of quick intuition and keen sensibility, he has shown the most wonderful self-control in the most trying circumstances. When others would be agitated and wholly thrown off their balance Mr. Plant would remain calm, quiet, cool, and clear-headed to a degree that stilled the tempest all around, and effected an amicable adjustment of matters most important as they were most complicated and difficult of settlement. ”

“ It deserves as much attention as any plant in cultivation, and yet how rarely is any thorough preparation made for its perfect development. What is there growing in garden or in wild more nobly distinct and beautiful than the great silvery plumes of this plant waving in the autumnal gusts—the burial plumes as it were of our summer too early dead? What tender plant so effective as this in giving a new aspect of vegetation to our gardens, if it be tastefully placed and well grown? ”

“ The growth of plant-life, which runs concurrently with the changing seasons of the year, impresses this fact upon us, and the history of animal development but repeats the tale. From seed to seed-leaf, from seed-leaf to stem and leaves, from simple leaves to flower, and from flower to fruit, there is exhibited a natural progress in plant-existence, which testifies eloquently enough, by analogy at least, to the existence of like tendencies in all other forms of life. ”

“ And again, bethink you, good, easy-going human being, how great are the difficulties she has to contend with, especially in the case of the plant creation. Put yourself in the orchid’s place, and you will see the reason. For remember how absolutely fixed and limited are plants, each rooted to the soil in a single small spot, each tied by strict conditions of rock, and water-supply, and air, and wind, and sun, and climate, from which none can escape, try they all their hardest. ”

“ That which disappears even at the moment of its production is assuredly not the manifestation of one primordial power, but only a consequence of the combined operation of various powers. The plant, a particular mode or manifestation of the formative-power of Nature, when left to itself, proceeds from the first germination to the ripening of the seed. ”

“ Even the simplest one-celled organisms have the faculty of increasing. In all plants, both the flowerless ones and those producing flowers, the process is carried to a perfection almost unbelievable in its intricacy and in provisions against its failure. From the matings of flowers much may be gleaned; even man himself can learn from them the capacity for sacrifice, the sinking of individual aims and pleasures in the greater scheme of conforming to that necessity for renewal of the race upon which all progress must be based. ”

“ Living mostly by the chase and on a few wild fruits picked from the forest these half-wild and savage people wandered wherever game was plentiful and the continental glacier would permit. But there came a day when one of these races began the cultivation of some of the wild plants about them and with that day dawned the real beginning of man’s use of plants. And with that day also these simplest of our ancestors stopped their wanderings in large part and became farmers, albeit very crude ones, as their primitive stone implements show. ”

“ The plant kingdom has become almost as clay in the hands of the potter. Where we now have one good crop plant, we may some day have five or ten. We need to start in earnest to apply some of our science to producing genius trees—trees that are to other trees as human geniuses are to other men. ”

“ All that plant life has so far attained and all that it will attain to in future—perhaps also all that it might have attained to—must have been present in the plant-spirit of that original plant-germ. And it is through the working out—the realising—of this ideal which actuated that plant-spirit, and through the response which this spirit made to the stimulus of its surroundings that all the wonderful development of plant life has taken place. The plant-spirit had to keep within the lines of plant life ”

“ They are a change and relief, in their soothing monotony and simple plant life, from the lush and variegated flower fields, the dense and hostile chaparral thickets, the dark forests of great trees, and the miles of artificial plantations of orchards and vines. ”

“ Himself should the keeper of such plant about their houses broad belts of thyme and pines brought from the hill heights; himself wear his hand hard with work, himself bed the soil with fruitful shoots and water them with kindly showers. ”

“ Nothing stifles a natural love for plants more effectually than that old way.
The new way is to watch the life of every growing thing, to look upon each plant as a living creature, whose life is a story as fascinating as the story of any favorite hero. ”

“ Give up the idea that by ruling over others you can do any good to them. But you can do just as much as you can in the case of the plant; you can supply the growing seed with the materials for the making up of its body, bringing to it the earth, the water, the air, that it wants. It will take all that it wants by its own nature. ”

“ Now if we withdraw the plant from this position, which it hardly endures, and supply it with the earth and maintain about it the temperature that it delights in; withdrawing from it, at the same time, all rivals, which in such conditions Nature would have thrust upon it, we shall indeed obtain a magnificently developed example of the plant, colossal in size, and splendid in organization; but we shall utterly lose in it that moral ideal which is dependent on its right fulfilment of its appointed functions. ”

“ In a plant, for instance, there is the combination of a growing point, a humus or pabulum that feeds it, and the stimuli, air, water, light, and all the "skiey influences" by which its [Pg 51] passive vitality is excited and sustained. We see plant life, by reason of these concurrent adaptations, swelling into leaf, stem, bud, corolla, and fruit, throughout all the brighter tribes of vegetable beauty that bloom apparent to the unassisted eye. And the like holds true respecting animals, but with increased variety and complication of conditions, made necessary by their higher mode of existence. ”

“ Living in a plant-infested world as we are elected to do, eating plants, wearing their [351] products, utilizing them in all our arts, buying and selling them daily, unable to get through an hour of the day without being constantly reminded of our entire dependence upon the members of the vegetable kingdom, what is more natural than that we should wish to know them? To know their names is not the end and aim of plant study. ”

“ The skillful gardener, looking over his flowers, finds a plant of more than ordinary beauty and thrift of growth. When it comes to maturity he keeps its seeds separate from those of the rest and next year plants them by themselves. As they come up he weeds out all unthrifty plants, only allowing the strongest to come to maturity. ”

“ So extravagant is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees, but as far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroy these gardens. ”

“ It is a sort of mental growth with them; at every instant a bud shoots forth, and on this another and still another; each producing, increasing, blooming of itself, so that after a few moments we find first a green plant crop up, then a thicket, then a forest. ”

“ Thus the whole of the vegetable world, including rigid trees perceive the changes in their environment and respond to them by unmistakable signals. They thrill under light and become depressed by darkness; the warmth of summer and frost of winter, drought and rain, these and many other happenings leave a subtle impression on the life of the plant. By invention of apparatus of extreme delicacy, it is possible to make the plant itself write down the history of its own experience in a hieroglyphic which it is possible to decipher. ”

“ Form, color, the secretion of sweetish nectar, the night or day blooming of different kinds of flowers, every device that will make fertilization certain, by the flower itself, by insects, or even by the wind, is used in such prodigal fashion, that we come to see the importance of it to all plants only by a realization of the complexity of it and the provisions against its failure. ”

“ Everyone is familiar with it in cultivation; but the garden-plant has a sadly decaying, draggled look at all times, and to my mind, is often positively ugly with its dense withering mass of coarse leaves, drooping on the ground, and bundle of spikes, always of the same dead white or dirty cream-colour. ”