Had a good chat with your houseplant today?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, botany, research, plant consciousness, communication, signaling, plant movement, plant intelligence

In the human realm, "talking to the animals" like Dr. Doolittle is fictional. In the plant realm, it may be commonplace. What constitutes "communication"? There is more philosophy than science wrapped up in any attempt to answer that question. Even more so for the words "consciousness" and "intelligence". We may not have definitive answers in the next few decades, and perhaps we never will. In The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, author Zoë Schlanger doesn't provide the answers, though some of those she interviewed offered nascent attempts at doing so.

The eleven chapters of Light Eaters delve into several strains of research that are on the verge of redefining what a "plant" really is and re-settling our understanding of the rôles plants play in the biosphere. As we find from numerous lines of research, plants have several routes of plant-to-plant signaling: chemical, electrical, acoustic, and possibly bacterio-genetic. Plants discriminate. They are found to send differing signals to siblings versus non-siblings of the same species; plants of one species can also "eavesdrop" on signals of another species. Furthermore, plants send signals intended for animal species! An example of the latter is the plants that emit a pheromone that attracts a certain species of parasitic wasp when a caterpillar that the wasp parasitizes begins chewing on the plant's leaves. It's rather like a youngster who gets attacked and calls on his older brother for help, but in this case the "older brother" is a different species. Plants getting chewed on also emit other volatile chemicals that alert nearby plants, which respond by altering the chemistry of their leaves to be distasteful or even toxic to the caterpillar.

These are examples of chemical signaling. Other stressors such as drought result in plants making tiny clicking noises as low-pressure bubbles collapse; it is similar to the popping knuckles most people engage in. It's hard for me to determine what kind of research showed other plants responding to these barely audible sounds, but Chapter 5, "An Ear to the Ground" presents the evidence. 

What about electrical signals? Within a plant, it has been found that cutting a leaf initiates a wave of electrical activity that sweeps through the plant. These images of a small plant leaf, taken just before a scissor cut, then one second after, and then seven more seconds later. The plant had been grown from seed containing engineered genes that cause the calcium channels (every cell has them) to trigger Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) when they emit or pass an electrical signal. The electrochemical signal moves as a wave through the whole plant. These images were clipped from this video. If the video doesn't work (they can be ephemeral), search for "gfp plant signaling". This is just one of several.

As the narrator in the video explains, the signal moves through the whole plant in about a minute along the veins, and spreads from the veins throughout all the plant's tissues at a slower rate.

This got me thinking. We know that while an electrical signal in a metallic wire is very fast, roughly the speed of light, the electrochemical signals in animal nerves are much slower. I had the neural conduction speed measured in my arm one time, after an injury. It was 60 m/s, which is normal. The fastest neural conduction speed in mammals is about twice this, and some nerves, where speed is less critical, are as slow as the range 2-5 m/s. Plants don't have nerves; at least none that we can recognize. But the veins seem to have a similar function, albeit slower, in the range of about 1 mm/s. That is between 2,000 and 120,000 times slower than animal neurons.

Put that together with a statement later in the book. The author had a hint of an idea (one I was toying with as I read): What if we think of the entire plant as a brain? She asked one scientist, who said, "I think you're right. I just don't talk about it." Let's speculate a bit. If you get jabbed in the leg with a pin, you'll react within about a quarter of a second. In the little plant shown in the video, which is about 10 cm across, the signal "I've been cut!" reaches the whole plant in less than two minutes. The "reaction" of the plant is to begin to synthesize noxious chemicals in the leaves, which takes a few hours. From this we can extract a couple of ratios:

1. We can infer the signaling time between your leg and brain as about 1/30 second. If signaling through the plant took 100 seconds, the ratio is 3,000:1.
2. Your physical flinch and "Ouch!" begin after about 1/4 second, while chemical synthesis in the plant gets underway in an hour (3,600 sec), for a ratio of 14,400:1.

If, then, the whole plant is, or contains, a distributed brain, it runs several thousand times more slowly than an animal brain. This is in accord with the rate that twigs grow on many woody plants, compared with the rate of animal motions. Animals move at about "the speed of gravity", by which I mean that rapid animal motions, such as swatting at a fly, happen at speeds similar to that of an object dropped a meter or so. Time-lapse videos of plants either growing or "doing" various things, such as the "reaching" of bean tendrils for something to cling to, show their motions to be hundreds to thousands of times slower than animal motions. It seems plausible that, if plants "think", they do so correspondingly slowly. While we cannot consider plants to have a nervous system, perhaps a term such as "signal conduction system" or "signal transduction system" can be used.

Do they think? Plant "intelligence" has been a fiercely contentious issue for decades, and that doesn't seem to be slowing down. Focusing on just three things: speed of motion, speed of communication, and speed of reaction, I (and, I think, Ms Schlanger) consider plants to be doing most things animals do, but on a time scale around 10,000 times slower. If we learn to talk to plants, and to hearken and understand what they are saying, we'll need enormous patience. Perhaps a translating SI (simulated intelligence) application can craft a signal at a rate the plant can accept, patiently receive its reply, and signal a human (who is doing something else in the meantime, because it could be hours) to come "read" the response. Even if the human then requires several minutes to decide what to say next, to the plant, the signal coming back, through the app, seems to begin almost instantly.

Finally, do plants see? Plants that mimic neighboring species hint that this is so. How can a South American vine Boquila take on the appearance of at least a few dozen other plants, just by growing in the vicinity? Moreso, if part of this vine is near one kind of plant, and another part is near another, it mimics both! To a lesser extent Mistletoe plants do something similar. One researcher believes the "signal" received by a Boquila plant is not visual, but bacterio-genetic, some kind of genetic signal from the neighboring plant's cloud of symbiont bacteria. All animals and all plants are inhabited by and surrounded by their own microbiome. Each breath we exhale contains members of our microbiome. Your own bacterial "envelope" changes every time you make a new friend and begin spending lots of time with him or her. The author finds a visual hypothesis more parsimonious, and I agree. Plants do have photoreceptors; they are chloroplasts. There are also other colored bodies in plants, in colors other than green. They may also receive light as well as reflect it, or they may provide color filters for chloroplasts to detect colored light. The author points out that this is similar to cuttlefish, which have color-blind eyes, yet they can still mimic the patterns and colors of the surface they are sitting on, probably because their whole skin surface is covered with photoreceptors that must provide the color signal.

I suggest a "red hat" experiment. Start with a number (12 at least) of plants that are wired to detect stress. Once they have recovered from being wired the experiment begins. Whenever the person who cares for the plants wears a red hat, that person also takes a snip from the end of one leaf of half the plants, chosen by a prearranged formula, and let some of the plants never be snipped. Let the interval between snipping incidents be a few days. I conjecture that after a few weeks at most, the plants will all react whenever the caretaker enters wearing the hat, before any snipping is done. This should indicate something visual on the part of the plants. It is likely that the never-snipped plants will react differently from the others. However, it is always possible that the caretaker is in a different mental state on "snipping days", and this causes an airborne chemical signal that the plants can detect and react to. I am not sure how to control for that.

Plants are fascinating, even more so now to me, after reading this book. What a great read!

-----------------------

A couple of quibbles and contentions:

1. On p 39 the author coined the adjective "Descartian", referring to René Descartes. The adjective "Cartesian" already exists and is easier to say.
2. On p 156 we read, "In the United States alone, as many as 11,000 farmworkers are fatally poisoned by pesticides each year, and another 385 million are severely poisoned…". 'Scuse me, but the entire US population is about 360 million, of whom two million are farmworkers. The CDC states 10,000-20,000 "poisonings" without saying how many are fatal. Sundry reports are all over the place. One appears to be the author's source for 11,000 fatalities yearly, while another states that 60,000 nonfatal incidents occurred in five years, or 12,000 per year. The author needs to dig a bit deeper.

Residents of a parallel universe

 kw: see list at the end

Consider what these creatures might be:

They "live within their own universe...a universe that is both dazzling and complicated. Its existence is within a different time scale than ours, visible only on close inspection by those interested enough to look. [They] live their lives just as we do, surrounded by loved ones, competitors, and enemies, seeking to find harmony and health; and hoping to leave behind a legacy of well-adjusted progeny capable of carrying on after their demise."

Consider a time scale between 100 and 10,000 times slower than ours. Depending on species, "they" may reach maturity in a year or less, as many familiar animals do, or it may take many centuries. Communication is nearly always soundless, and it is slow. To converse with one would entail waiting hours to days between, "How are you?" and "I can't complain." For most, communication is chemical, via air-wafted molecules or waterborne ones. Each "word" is synthesized on-the-spot.

We are used to animals, including ourselves, that move at the speed of gravity, or a little faster at times. To reach out, or to throw something, is done in fractions of a second. "They" make motions that take hours to months to complete. Usually: some can grasp or throw even more quickly than we can, under the right conditions*. But usually not.

What are "they"? Plants. A central theme of the textbook for gardeners, The Nature of Plants: An Introduction to How Plants Work by Craig N. Huegel, is that plants are as complex as animals, and do nearly everything animals do except move from place to place (usually!), but on slower time scales (usually!!), and typically in different ways.

The Nature of Plants is not a book of stories, it is a compendium of facts, ranged in subjects from Light, Water and Soil to Reproduction, Hormones and Communication. The quote in the first paragraph above is from the Conclusion. 

The book has one tremendous lack: a Glossary. One needs a good memory to read more than a page or two into the book, because one will learn new botanical and chemical terms on nearly every page. Perhaps you are familiar with xylem and phloem, the fluid-bearing tissues that, respectively, bring water (and its contents) from the roots, and transport "processed water" throughout the plant to supply sugar and nutrients. It's less likely that most folks know what is a prothallus (the sexual generation of a fern; the fronded plants we see are asexual), or the cell types parenchyma, collenchyma and sclerenchyma that make up all the tissues of plants. Then the parts of a flower: receptacle, sepals, petals (the flower's "clothing"), stigma, style, ovary, ovules (female parts), stamen, anther, and filament (male parts). Those aren't too bad, but then for ferns (the asexual spore-bearing generation), analogous parts are indusia, sporangia and sori. And on and on it goes. I felt lucky that I studied botany early in my college years; still I learned several new terms. If you intend to keep the book, take notes: Make your own index of terms and concepts you want to remember; the book's index is sketchy.

As I said, this is a book for gardeners, written as a textbook to make us aware of all the needs a plant has. For example: When buying a shrub or tree for your yard, do you know how to check if it is root bound? If the roots are growing in spirals, around and around the pot, and you plant it in the ground without doing a little spreading and even root pruning (carefully!), then as the plant grows and the roots increase in diameter, that clot of spiraling roots will become a roadblock to growth beyond a few years. Perhaps that is okay if you got a dwarf tree in the first place, but it will be less healthy than a dwarf tree that didn't spend very long in the pot before being planted out.

Do plants think? There is some research that indicates they do have something similar to nerve impulses, even electrical communication within (an electric signal is used in the leaf of the Venus flytrap, for example). Some scientists think the roots are the "brain". If we learn to communicate with them (very slowly), perhaps they will tell us.

To repeat: plants do everything we do except move about the landscape. I read in a different book, years ago, that a shrub or tree is analogous to a colony of tiny animals, with the growing tips of the twigs being the "animals". Over time, the growing, branching tips gain genetic differences, similar to the way successive generations of animals are genetically different from their ancestors. There are also some vining plants that do move slowly about, by growing into new territory, and rooting periodically, and when the oldest roots die the plant has actually moved to a new place. Over long spans of time, the vine can migrate surprisingly long distances. But these are not mentioned in this book, which is for gardeners. We have trouble enough with English ivy and Virginia creeper and even Kudzu; they may not abandon old roots, but any of them can fill a yard if we let them, as can Wisteria (There is a Wisteria plant in Sierra Madre, California that has destroyed the house it grew all over, and covers the entire one-acre building lot).

This book is worth reading through once, and then keeping on hand to look up helpful things. It deals in principles, not in advice about specific plants. With that in mind, it's worth having.

*The Venus flytrap has leaves that can close on a small insect in a tenth of a second. A number of plants have seed pods that build up tension as they dry, and then erupt to throw the seeds several feet away from the parent plant. The leaves of the Sensitive Mimosa close in less than a second after being touched.

kw: book reviews, botany, gardening

Getting your veggies in liquid form

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, botany, mixology

A favorite country tune, Rocky Top, has the lines

Corn don't grow so well on Rocky Top,
  Ground's too rocky by far.
That's why all the folk on Rocky Top
  Get their corn in a jar

Corn isn't all that gets into corn whiskey. As we read in The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks, by Amy Stewart, if a plant can be ingested (and sometimes if it can't), it has been used to produce an alcoholic beverage.

My drinking days are long behind me. I recall preferring port wine to all other wines (I particularly didn't like "dry" wines), and smooth Scotch whiskey to the rest of the "hard stuff." That ended before I was 21 years old. Port is fortified (higher proof), but also sweeter and more "grape-y", and of course, one could call Scotch "barley in a jar", although there is much more behind these drinks than grapes or barley. That "much more" is what the book is about.

In orderly fashion, Ms Stewart starts with the plants that produce the alcohol, from agave to wheat, including apples, grapes, sorghum and a few others, and then introduces some that are a bit more strange, such as bananas, jack fruit and parsnips. If it'll ferment, someone's tried to drink it.

There follows a series of chapters on every kind of plant product that has been used in a beverage. The only one left out seems to be bark (Oh, yeah, Cinnamon is made from a bark). Stems. Flowers. Spices. Roots. Fruits.

Many recipes are found throughout, and also gardening tips for growing certain otherwise hard-to-obtain plants. There are also tips in a few places about brewing your own, frequently by doing little more than harvesting, grinding or mashing some plant part, and leaving it alone for days or weeks. The yeast varieties that grow on the plant are frequently the ones that ferment it best. This points up that the first domestic organism was almost certainly yeast!

I don't want to get further into this. I have some fond memories of "non professional" mixology, such as learning by accident how easy it is to produce cider ("hard cider" is a redundancy). But for me the drawbacks of an imbibing life outweighed the pleasures. If you enjoy "adult beverages" and mixology, this book is a delightful introduction to the botany behind the beverages.

Hamilton's doctor and his plants

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, doctors, history, horticulture, botany, botanists, early united states history

On the left, Manhattan (except the north end) in 1811. On the right, the same view in 2018. The 1811 image is from the book American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, by Victoria Johnson.

Who was David Hosack? He was the most famous doctor I'd never heard of. If I heard the name in an American History class, I didn't retain it. Two items in the 1811 view indicate his importance. The first, a spot that matches the location of Rockefeller Center, which is marked in the 1918 image, is a tiny rectangle labeled "Botanic Garden". The second, across the Hudson River and farther north, is a spot labeled "Monument of Gen. Hamilton". The monument marks the spot where, on July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr shot former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel over Hamilton's opposition to Burr in his bid to be Governor of New York State. The attending physician was David Hosack. Though he failed to preserve Hamilton's life, he had saved many lives that other doctors considered lost causes.

David Hosack (a Scottish name pronounced "Hozzick"), born in 1769, had studied both medicine and botany, and spent time in his late twenties in Scotland, where he first encountered botanical gardens in Edinburgh. he developed a passion for learning medical uses for plants. He already knew how to cure, or at least alleviate, symptoms of malaria and other fevers using "Peruvian bark", which contained quinine; the few effective medicines besides mercury were all plant parts or plant extracts.

After returning to New York and establishing a medical practice, Dr. Hosack bought 20 acres of land on the Middle Road in the middle of Manhattan Island where he established Elgin Garden in 1801. In just the ten years he had the garden, he gathered plants of all kinds, trained numerous medical students to recognize and use the medically useful ones, and corresponded with numerous botanists and botanical-medical men all over Europe and the American colonies. He corresponded with Jefferson, who had some interest in botany. He became the most famous doctor of the time, and his garden inspired others to set up gardens and arboreta that became the network of horticultural establishments found all over the U.S.

Ms Johnson's book outlines all this, with a wealth of fascinating details about life in and around New York two centuries ago, when Manhattan was mostly farmland. Only later, but in Hosack's lifetime, was Middle Road renamed Fifth Avenue. In 1810, after a few years of lobbying effort, Hosack sold Elgin Garden to the State of New York, though the state took its own sweet time to pay him. He could not continue the massive financial burden of maintaining the garden and its workers. It wasn't but a few years before the state divested itself, turning the garden over to Columbia University, which later sold the land to the consortium that began to build Rockefeller Center, which almost exactly covers the footprint of Elgin Garden, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

Whenever you see paintings by members of the "Hudson River School", some of which depict scenes in and around Manhattan and the other areas that now comprise New York City, take a moment to reflect upon the lovely scenes that once filled the area before it all became paved over and built to the sky with monuments to corporate power. And remember to be thankful that only a few percent of this nation has been paved and built upon, that large areas were set aside to retain their natural splendor. Also remember to be thankful for scholars such as David Hosack, whose passion for learning from nature inspired many of the medicines we take for granted, bestowed by the plants that grow all around us.

From lab girl to lab woman

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, scientists, botany, autobiographies, memoirs

The stereotype of a career scientist is of someone rather dour, square, dispassionate, and driven; one who cannot be deterred; someone who knew what he (rarely she) wanted in a career and thus majored in a chosen field, obtained degrees (at least two or three), excelled at research, obtained a university position, published (and published and published), obtained tenure, and eventually has come to rule a scientific domain as an éminence grise (best translation: "grizzled crag"). A straight line from birth to near-godhood.

Ha! Not in my experience!! The few grizzled crags I've known were either really harsh SOB's who attained eminence while leaving behind a trail of shattered foes, or (much better!) perpetual children who still aren't sure just what they want to be when they grow up, but have mightily enjoyed the ride along the way. The best scientists breathe curiosity, emit questions with every breath, and seldom take anything for granted. They know that great discoveries frequently began when someone said, "That's funny! What IS that?"

But the one adjective above that is accurate is "driven". Driven to know, driven to find out what and how and perhaps even why. Driven to learn endlessly and hoping, if not to find ultimate truth, to carve a new step or two along the path. Sometimes they know this for what it is. Sometimes not. Either way, a scientist worth knowing seems always to have a twinkle in his or her eye.

Getting to know Hope Jahren through her memoir/odyssey Lab Girl, it seemed at first that her dour Minnesota Scandanavian upbringing might have squashed all the twinkle out of her. She remembers her mother as unendingly stern and undemonstrative, and nearly always angry. But as we learn of her own nearly catastrophic level of bipolarity, and that she hints how it ran in her family, a more sympathetic picture emerges: that her mother kept herself under supremely strict control, not liking it but seeing no other way. The twinkle was suppressed in order to conform to the stultifying reserve inherent in the Minnesotans. Too bad they didn't run into Garrison Keillor very early on! He showed the fun under the stiff collar. Clearly, Dr. Jahren had twinkle enough left in her to have a stellar scientific career. But it came slowly, laboriously.

Lab Girl is half memoir and half an introduction to the botany of trees. At first, a chapter on herself and her life alternates with one on the growth of a seed, a sprout, a sapling. By the end of the book, the segments begin to mix. Dr. Jahren has become the tree she writes about, having survived stage by stage of growth, succeeding in spreading her canopy to take in enough sun to thrive.

We look on human life as though success were a right, a given; that "infant mortality" were an aberration; that poverty of body and soul ought to be rare. The mathematics of reproduction in a forest are grim: A tree produces millions of seeds yearly, and at the end of a life that may be no more than 25 years for a Mimosa or as long as hundreds to thousands of years for oaks and redwoods, if two of those seeds have sprouted, grown, and become mature trees, that counts as reproductive success. We count it unusual for a baby or child to die. But even in this most "enlightened" part of Western culture, we pay little attention when dreams die, when millions labor at nearly useless "work", when the bad (i.e. paranoid) kind of "grizzled crag" crushes the hopes of one perceived opponent after another, whether in science, business, art, governance, or industry.

For much of Dr. Jahren's career she was frequently, almost constantly, in danger of being crushed by more established fellow scientists. Like a sapling in a forest, frequently overshadowed and starved of sunlight, she had to struggle to make her way. But make it she did. And I don't think she is at the peak of her career. Perhaps writing this book indicates that she has a nagging suspicion that she has indeed peaked. Not likely. She has too much drive, too much spunk.

Her blog is hopejahrensurecanwrite.com, and I agree, she sure can write! She writes so well, it might actually be a negative in the eyes of some. My younger brother, now an established professor, was denied admission to a History department's PhD program largely because of jealousy: he was already a published author with a very readable writing style, and history professors are well known for writing either badly or abominably. His "judges" felt diminished in his presence. So he got into an Archaeology school instead and the rest is (giggle) history! However, as Hope Jahren tells us, early on she became proficient at writing "a language few read and nobody speaks", the dry, ultra-precise prose of the scientific article or monograph. Rather than let it stultify her popular writing, she learned to use the lessons of scientific writing to sharpen and brighten it. Thus, when she isn't trying to impress a granting agency, she writes sparkling, need I say, twinkling, prose. I think she has another book or few in her. I hope so.

Foremost Zoologist writes about Botany

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, botany, love of plants, exhortation

Jane Goodall is one of my favorite people. Her discoveries about chimpanzees turned primatology and anthropology on its head, not just once but several times. Even more, her tireless quest to drive world leaders and citizens to a better balance with nature continues to touch a chord in me and in many.

One might ask, what is a Zoologist doing writing about plants? For every animal you study, you must study its relationships, not only within its species but with other animal species such as prey or predators, and nearly always with the plants in its environment. Even a pure carnivore such as a big cat uses plants for concealment, for bedding and so forth. And now that biology has turned more and more to the study of trophic cascades (If you have never seen this video about Yellowstone, stop and watch it now!), every life is seen to depend on plants, and every life, particularly of keystone species, affects the life cycles of plants in its environment.

Dr. Goodall is a writer of rare skill, and for this and a few other recent books she has teamed up with Gail Hudson to produce a volume that matches the best 19^th Century writing, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants. The book is one part her historical and lyrical paean to the plants and their landscapes that she has loved in her long life, one part historical and social survey, and one part (or two!) hortatory essays that exhort us all to take better care of a biosphere the human race is rapidly driving to ruin. Her voice is lyrical without being maudlin, high and clear without being shrill.

Anyone who has lived more than 25-30 years, and has not seen substantial changes in nearly every landscape with which they are familiar, must have lived a cloistered prisoner all those years. I visited Suguaro National Park nearly 50 years ago, when it looked a lot like the image on the left in this montage:

On the right, in 1910, the difference is shocking. Look particularly in the background, where the mountain foothills are being covered with creeping suburbs near Tucson, Arizona (Photo montage from this article by Betty Mason in Wired).

Her message boils down to something simple: "Hey, World, please, please slow down and think more long-term. You billionaires don't need another billion or ten billion quite that fast, and people's needs can be taken care of without destroying everything around them until ultimately they and you will also suffer destruction."

I don't think there is anything I could add to that. Rather, I'll take a side note, and answer some who might know me well, how conservative I am, and say, "Huh?" Did you know that the root of "Conservative" is the word "Conserve"? Did you know that the national park system was begun by Conservatives? Strangely, Theodore Roosevelt is being called a Progressive in recent biographies and documentaries, but he sure wasn't thought of as a "progressive" a century ago or so! He's just being called that because today's neo-progressives can't imagine that someone with conservative values would do the things he did. A true conservative is not a short-term thinker, but a strategic thinker. Trouble is, there just are too darn few of them left to be found in national and international politics. A conservative who is not an environmentalist (a true environmentalist, not a fuzzy-headed tree-hugger), cannot honestly claim the title Conservative.

'Nuff said. Read the book.

Decoding botany

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, botany, nomenclature, dictionaries

Do you think you want to be a botanist? The prime asset to beginning a botanical career is a classical education. That's right, the Trivium (Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy). And Grammar, including both Latin and Greek vocabulary, was traditionally taught in Latin; "grammar" is the study of the Latin rules of sentence construction. In fact, prior to the mid-19^th Century, all seven subjects were taught in Latin. This would not be a bad idea today, particularly for anyone entering a biological science.

For those of us who prefer a more glancing acquaintance with formal botany, at least a course or two in Latin and Greek vocabulary would be a big help. Then, if you want just a smattering of "latinate" word knowledge, you would do well to read through Latin for Gardeners: Over 3,000 Plant Names Explained and Explored by Lorraine Harrison. The core of the book is a dictionary listing of the 3,000 or so terms with very brief meanings. For example, a few items from the "F" pages:

fenestralis fen-ESS-tra-lis
fenestralis, fenestrale
With openings like a window, as in Vriesia fenestralis

fibrillosus fy-BRIL-oh-sus
fibrillosa, fibrillosum
fibrosus fy-BROH-sus
fibrosa, fibrosum
Fibrous, as in Dicksonia fibrosa

Certain prefixes are also shown, including

multi-
Used in compound words to denote many

poly-
Used in compound words to denote many

I picked a pair that includes one from Latin and one from Greek; both are used. It would have helped just a bit more if the author noted that multi- is from Latin and poly- is from Greek. A simple L and G in the listing would do. 3,000 of those would not take up much extra space. A regular rule, not always followed, is to use a Latin prefix with a Latin determiner and so with Greek. An example that keeps the rule is polycarpus; -carpus is from Greek for a fruit or seed pod, but originally meant "wrist". Your carpal bones reside in your wrists and the back of your hands. A plant named polycarpus has many fruits.

If this were only a dictionary it would be pretty dry fare. But the author has included biographical notes on 15 "plant hunters" (AKA explorers) and 20 plant genera such as Helianthus and Quercus (sunflower and oak). There is also a small "Latin in Action" blurb every 3-4 pages, and short essays on "plant themes" that include groups of words related to, for example, color or fragrance. I would like to have seen a section just on the prefixes and suffixes, perhaps even a matrix or table showing the many suffixes that go with each prefix, by means of a check mark or block. A big lack is explanation of Genera. Only 20 are described, and Delphinium, for example, is not one of them. How to know the word is derived from "Dolphin"?

All that aside, it is a good book to keep handy for looking up the meaning of a species name. Quercus rubra? Aha! Red oak! If you want to dig deeper into Biological Latin (quite distinct from Classical Latin or the Church Latin all Roman Catholics had to learn until about 1975), a good place to start is this BayGardens article, and the links it contains.

Unhiding a hidden land

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, botany, nations

One of the first songs my voice teacher in my teenage years had me prepare for a recital was "The Road to Mandalay", based on an 1892 poem by Rudyard Kipling. I did not know at the time that Mandalay was a former capital city of Burma, now named Myanmar. I didn't even bother to wonder what kind of road would have flying fishes playing! Only this week did I learn that the "road" was the Irawaddy River, which is navigable nearly from its headwaters in the Himalayas to its huge delta in the Bay of Bengal. It is the main "road" from Yangon (formerly Rangoon) to Mandalay and points north.

I learned about this "road" while reading The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Secret Land of Myanmar by W. John Kress, a botanist with the Smithsonian Institution. The first chapter is about the Weeping Goldsmith, or padeign gno in Burmese, which is a folk name for Globba magnifica, a ginger plant highly prized for its flowers. Legend has it that no goldsmith has been able to produce a golden replica of this flower, and one who tries will end up weeping.

Dr. Kress is an expert in gingers. To those of us who know only Zingiber officinale as the spice Ginger, it may come as a surprise that the family Zingiberacea comprises 1,300+ species so far known. Many have uses as medicines or spices. The spices Turmeric and Cardamom are from this family, all of which the author calls gingers. On his expeditions to Myanmar from 1993 until 2002, he and his colleagues discovered dozens of new ginger species and a many more other new species of plant.

In addition to the ordinary apparatus of a scholarly book, an appendix illustrates 25 interesting (non-ginger) plants known chiefly from Myanmar, and 25 species of gingers and ginger relatives. Though I call this book scholarly, it is very readable, in the tradition of classic works such as Half Mile Down or Voyage of the Beagle. It is not a highly technical monograph, but a travelogue through the seasons of the year in Myanmar, gleaned from many visits, but focusing on the monsoon, because gingers sprout and flower during the rainy season. They're rather hard to find in the dry season.

Dr. Kress's colleague U Thet Htun, shown here with his family, was a great help to the author with the logistics and contacts needed to make several of his collecting trips. The honorific U formally means "uncle", but is used like we use "Mr.", though more frequently. The feminine honorific "Daw" corresponds to our "Ms". These prefixes are used throughout the book because Burmese names do not convey any sense of gender the way most Western names do.

U Thet Htun's wife and child are wearing a concoction of thanakha, made from the bark of the citrus Hesperethusa crenulata. It is much used as a sunscreen, and its attractive pale yellow color makes it a popular cosmetic also. It is painted on the face in intricate designs, much the way henna is used in Europe.

Myanmar may be the most intensely Buddhist country in the world. This vista of the plains near Bagan shows a few hundred of the thousands of pagodas to be found just in this area, and there must be many tens of thousands of pagodas throughout this small country (its area is similar to that of Texas).

A side story comes to mind. When we lived in South Dakota, we found that it was not too hard to drive to areas in which our presence and that of the road were the only signs of human life, right to the horizon in all directions. While driving to Oklahoma in 1986, by mid-Nebraska I realized that I could always see at least three or four grain silos, showing the locations of the towns and small cities. Skip eight years. On a business trip I visited Germany, near Aachen. I noticed while driving to Aachen from Düsseldorf, in very flat country, that it "felt" like Oklahoma. I looked around with new eyes, seeing towers in all directions, seven or eight of them: they were cathedral spires! That was the impression of western Germany that sticks with me: a land littered with cathedrals the way midwestern America is littered with grain silos…or church steeples.

I don't think the density of church steeples in America rivals this display of Buddhist pagodas, however. Buddhists don't "go to church" the way Christians do. They strive to live a life of merit, so as to earn a better station in their next incarnation. No Buddhist wants to live as a jerk and return as a mosquito. This has been fortuitous for forestry. The lands surrounding pagodas are considered sacred, and all the people take at least nominal care of them. But times are changing, as the Epilogue notes, and Myanmar's teak forests are being logged and trucked to China.

During his visits, Dr. Kress was able not only to collect and record specimens, but also to train numbers of young botanists and foresters. A few visiting scholars can do only so much. It is the people of Myanmar who must preserve its forests…or not.

One sign of the growing commerce with China is signs such as this, in Western letters, Chinese, and Burmese (this is the name of a town). Though the Burmese language is tonal and monosyllabic, like Chinese, it is written with a phonetic script, one that I find pleasingly loopy. They use consonants in combinations we find difficult to imagine pronouncing (such as in the name Htun), and have 33 consonants, including one that cannot be described in English! Then there are the 16 vowel sounds. At least a couple of these require an English tongue to do things that make it ache until one gets into practice.

Nonetheless, the author learned the language well enough to carry on basic conversation, and to follow the gist of others' conversations. He has hopes to return to a country and culture so different from his own.