Terese Svoboda

PLANT HUMORS

My face flattens against the windowpane of a transparent petal, the Diphylleia grayi's to be exact, the skeleton flower, native to Japan, China and Appalachia but of course you can buy it here in the northwest where the rain keeps the petals transparent most of the time. Five minutes into a deluge, the bloom is drained of all color, with only the green and yellow center left, like the Invisible Man with his liver and spleen showing. But seeing through a plant doesn't allow me to “see through” it, understand it. Plants are not even mirrors, the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo's oeuvre notwithstanding, all they allow is emotional mirroring: daisies for happiness, roses for love, lilies for sorrow.

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Plants don't mimic us, scientists say. They have no vision, it's just that mutations appear and if favorable to the plant, they are adapted, the best example being how they mimic the smell of rotting flesh to attract insects. How do we mimic them? Thorns suggest weaponry, a leaf floating off down a river inspires the possibility of boating.

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For years I watched my father's sunflowers turn with the sun, and their heads droop in the fall, heavy with so many seeds, the epitome of sad. He did well with his crops, slit their throats and bashed a billion heads of grain free. Although farming often involves pastures, it is not pastoral. My father woke my mother one night by shouting: I'm going to kill you. My mother didn't know what to think until he added, still asleep: you broadleaf plants. He'd been spraying the crops all day. He died a few years ago, un-poisoned by all that pesticide, but requested a strong coffin to protect him from the elements, knowing well its vengeance.

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Why do I worry about my long-stemmed basil when I hear the wind blow? I feel guilty that it's long stemmed to start with, planted where there's not enough sun. It has worked so hard to overcome that handicap, and then to have a fierce wind pull at it all day – 

I inherited a quarter of a section of my father's land that now grows organic wheat, corn and millet. One year a drought turned the stubby cornstalks entirely blue, a color so unnatural, so clearly stressed.

I screw my finger into the basil's soil to see if it needs a good watering to hold it down, and feel I'm being too intimate around the roots, like a gynecologist. Maybe a dry bed is better? 

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Twenty-five years ago, I adopted a two-leafed plant with the unusually ugly name of Haemanthus deformis. In year twenty, fourteen bizarre-looking offsets appeared on both leaves and triggered my latent plant mother. I separated the plant from its ever-larger offsets, certain the babies needed room to grow. Both the Haemanthus deformis' two leaves shriveled. Mistake. I put the mother plant back into the original tiny pot, followed by the babies. Now fifteen Haemanthus deformis crowd the mother, her leaves thick and healthy, each plant blooming a single white pompom every year.

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Looking up at my namesakes – well, okay, my name only sounds like trees – a hundred and fifty feet growing straight up into the sky of the rainforest, I feel I should be on my knees.

  Why cut you off my boughs, which largely bend,
                        And from the scorching sun do you defend,

begins “A Dialogue Between an Oak and a Man Cutting Him Down,” written in the 17th century by Margaret Cavendish, a poem in which a tree argues against a man chopping it down, and the tree wins, after many stanzas, by pointing out how it protects and defends and nourishes him.

Plants – especially trees – are our overlords, dominating the earth before animals, defying gravity, breathing through their leaves, turning light into sugar, feeding us – all those things. We bow before them. But communication is difficult, and predation is easy. The sadness I felt seeing my father's drooping sunflowers and my frantic efforts to save my mother plant point toward the human emotional connection – parental at its most elemental –  that must be harnessed to protect the plant world. Why can't we figure out that without plants there will be no humans?