The Power of Plants

Excerpts from the book by the same name

By Brendan Lehane

"Behind the fragrance of a violet and the frail beauty of a rose, lies the most tenacious life-force in the world:  the power of plants to survive.  From the momentous day, a billion or so years back, when the first speck of plant protoplasm puffed its first breath of oxygen into some primeval sea, the collective energy of plants has been directed at the colonization of the world.  The means of their success has been an almost limitless capacity to change, to assume so many shapes, colors, and sizes that some of them, somewhere, always succeed.

"They imbibe sunlight and make vital power of it.  They create life from non-life, and nourish not only themselves, but the whole of animal creation -- many of whom they put to work for their own purposes.

"They range in size from minute microbe to the world’s tallest, most massive creatures.  They live to whatever age suits them, be it a matter of hours or five thousand years.  They can break rocks, staunch floods, precipitate rain, or knit sand to resist the buffets of the sea.  After catastrophes of Fire, Eruption, Hurricane, and Avalanche, they can rise again, like the phoenix, to retrace their patient progress across the land.  To procreate their species, they have enslaved whole races of insects.  To spread themselves, they enlist wind, sea, and animals as porters.  No man can garner sunbeams, or commit his offspring to the wind for a journey of a thousand miles.  A dandelion can.  Science has far to go before it matches the ingenuity of a wayside weed."

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