GreenPrints Sampler: Wit, Wisdom, & Learning
Grow your knowledge about gardening science and history now!
Editor’s Letter
Dear Gardener,
Welcome to Wit, Wisdom & Learning: 15 practical stories for becoming a better gardener—you’ll learn a whole lot about gardening science, weather, and gardening history in such a short amount of space when you read these stories. And all for FREE!
Each of the 15 stories included in this FREE Sampler are authored by Becky Rupp, our resident expert on gardening science and history. Becky’s writing approach brings the topic to life in ways that help you better understand gardening science and grow your knowledge.
Informative and entertaining—you can’t beat that!
For example, here are some facts you might find interesting and revealing:
- Sunflowers are native to the Americas and were cultivated by indigenous people more than 3,000 years ago.
- Of all the senses, smell is by far the most evocative. Though the human nose can’t hold a candle to that of the average dog—dogs have about 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, as opposed to a piddling six million for humans—we’re still capable of differentiating among some 10,000 different smells.
- Many of our measurement units are based on gardening concepts.
- The reason people in some northern locations need to start tomato seedlings under grow lights is because the Earth—unlike decent straight-up-and-down planets like Mercury or Venus—lolls back on its axis to the tune of 23.4 degrees.
- Pineapples can take two or more years to ripen.
- Chlorophyll is complicated. Its basic chemical formula is C55H72O5N4Mg—a grand total of 137 atoms—and it’s not easy to put together. It takes well over a dozen complicated steps and a host of enzymes to synthesize the stuff.
These are just a sampling of facts you’ll find in these stories—now go and learn!
Here’s to growing your gardening science knowledge.
Amanda MacArthur
Daily Editor
GreenPrints
P.S. GreenPrints is your personal garden magazine. GreenPrints’s mission is to share the joys, humor, headaches, and heart of gardening through wonderful stories and beautiful art. Please be sure to check out the latest issue and your personal subscription offer today.
Following the Sun
Up to a point. By Becky Rupp
“But tomorrow may rain so I’ll follow the sun.”
—The Beatles
What do you believe?
Individually, most of us know pretty much where we stand on life’s bigger issues—and similarly on life’s smaller, though even on these we may not agree, which is what leads to family ructions over things like toothpaste squeezing and cats on the bed.
Publicly, though, belief gets a lot more complicated. The news these days—no matter what your political sympathies—can’t help but make you wonder who truly believes what. Who’s telling the truth? Who’s sincere? Who’s lying? Who should we believe?
Sooner or later we have to decide.
Which brings me to gardens. And sunflowers.
Sunflowers—along with corn, beans, peppers, potatoes, and cotton—are native to the Americas, likely cultivated more than 3,000 years ago by the indigenous people of Mexico and the Southwest. It was these farmers, archaeologists believe, who changed the sunflower from a runty, multi-branched wildflower to the behemoth grown in fields and gardens today. The Spanish conquistadors brought the sunflower—along with a lot of other loot—to Spain, from where it spread through Europe as an ornamental. Scientists pounced upon it: Nicolás Monardes, in his Joyfull Newes Out of the New Founde World (1577), gave it an enthusiastic description under the heading “The Hearbe of the Sunne.” He also added helpfully, “It is needefull that it leane to some thing where it groweth or else it will bee always falling,” a stricture that still applies today.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, first happened upon sunflowers in 1697 in Holland. Peter was touring western Europe at the time, learning navigation and shipbuilding techniques with an eye to modernizing the Russian navy. He was traveling incognito and working as a carpenter in the Dutch shipyards—though just how incognito he was is a matter of debate, since he was accompanied by an entourage of 250 and stood 6-ft., 7-in. tall in his socks. He sent sunflowers home, and in doing so, changed the Russian economy.
Sunflowers—Helianthus annuus—are named both for their flashy yellow flowers and for their sun-tracking behavior. Botanical groupies, sunflowers follow the sun, slowly tilting their heads from east to west over the course of a day, then returning to face east again overnight, ready to start the whole process over again. Scientifically, this behavior is known as heliotropism and in sunflowers it occurs because auxins—plant growth hormones—accumulate in greater quantities on the side of the sunflower stem opposite the sun. The hormones prod the cells on that side of the stem to elongate and multiply, which in turn causes the flower head to tilt.
According to recent research, there’s even more to it than that. Sunflowers, it turns out, have circadian rhythms—that is, a 24-hour internal clock determines their east-to-west and back again daily motion. Put sunflowers in a greenhouse under artificial light and try to make them adjust to a 30-hour schedule and they’re not having any.
There’s a reason for all of this sun-following, other than frivolous beach-bunny-like basking. Sun-facing flowers are warmer and bees like warm flowers best. Scientists—by cruelly yanking sunflowers around and making them face the wrong way—found that sun-facing flowers are visited by five times as many pollinating bees.
All that back-and-forth sun-tracking behavior doesn’t last forever. It only happens with youthful sunflowers. Once a sunflower reaches adulthood—by which time it can be a towering 10-foot-tall plant with a flower up to a foot across—it ceases to waffle. Adult sunflowers settle down and stay pointed determinedly toward the rising sun in the east. Once they’re grown-ups, sunflowers stay put.
Tsar Peter’s sunflowers, back home in Russia, were wildly popular. Russian sunflower growers soon developed bigger and better cultivars both for eating—Russians to this day love to snack on sunflower seeds—and for oil. The passion for sunflowers was encouraged by a quirk of the Russian Orthodox Church, which forbade the consumption of butter, lard, and vegetable oils during Lent—with the notable exception of sunflower oil. In fact, in one of those twists of fate so common in the garden world, by the 19th century, gargantuan and nutritious Russian sunflowers were being imported back into the Americas.
Today the prime producers of sunflowers worldwide are Russia and Ukraine—the two collectively account for an annual 30 million metric tons of sunflower seeds and over 70 percent of the world’s sunflower oil. In Ukraine, the sunflower has always been a national symbol. Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February of this year, a display of sunflowers has come to be a global signal of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. The Washington Post calls them “a symbol of resistance, unity, and hope.”
Sometimes what we grow in our gardens means more than we think it does.
I believe that our beliefs aren’t set in stone. We’ve always got time and options for growing, for learning, for experiencing, for changing our minds. But sooner or later, when it comes to right and wrong, we have to come down on one side or the other.
We have to decide what we believe and who we choose to listen to.
And that’s when—like those sunflowers—we stop shifting with the sun, dig in our heels, and face our east. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2022, in GreenPrints Issue #131. Illustrations by Christopher Reid.
Eating the Rainbow
Garden colors are good for the plants— and for gardeners. By Becky Rupp
A lot of nutritionists these days are urging us to eat our way through the color wheel. The Seven Day Color Diet, for example, first popularized in 2003, suggests choosing food of a different color for each day of the week. On Red Day, for example, diners eat tomatoes, apples, and cranberries; on Orange Day, squash, carrots, and sweet potatoes. (The seven recommended colors—they cheat a bit —are White, Red, Green, Orange, Purple, Yellow, and Rainbow.)
NPR’s The Splendid Table reported on a ROY G BIV diet in which each day of the week was devoted to a different color of the visible spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. The participants started out boldly with Red (tomato soup, red peppers, pomegranates), but fell down a bit at the BIV end of the scale, which was heavy in blueberries and blue corn chips. They finally polished off the week with a multicolored veggie pizza.
Rainbow seems to be the way to go: the truth of the matter is that the more colors on your plate or in your salad bowl, the healthier the meal. Visually, this is also a plus for us: we’re a color-oriented species. Stick us in a colorless environment—say, one of those offices with beige cement-block walls—and we soon become depressed and unproductive. We mope and doodle on our spreadsheets. There’s a reason why, in the dismal and dystopic world of George Orwell’s 1984, there’s no color in anything.
In 1999, a concept of restaurants serving food in the dark began. By this they didn’t mean a romantic candlelit dimness, but pitch-black, the deep dark of caves and coal mines where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. The idea is said to have originated with Jorge Spielmann, a blind clergyman from Zurich, who periodically asked his dinner guests to wear blindfolds to help them better appreciate his sightless world. When some remarked that the blindfolds enhanced their senses of taste and smell, Spielmann decided to open a restaurant. Hence Zurich’s Blindkuh (Blind Cow), the first restaurant in the world to be entirely staffed by blind waiters and waitresses and where dining takes place in the dark.
Since then, dark restaurants have popped up in cities worldwide. There’s one just north of us—Onoir in Montreal—where patrons are allowed a lighted peek at the menu before being led into the dark-as-the-inside-of-a-pocket dining room. In most such restaurants, food is served in bite-sized pieces—owners worry about temporarily blinded patrons waving steak knives around—and is accompanied by wine in unbreakable glasses. The big questions, though: in the dark, does food taste better? What’s eating like, deprived of color?
In theory, the loss of one sense—say, sight—leads to neural re-scrambling in the brain, apportioning more neurons to still active senses like hearing, smell, and taste. At a guess, this should make meals a more enriching experience for the blind—but for the temporarily blindfolded it doesn’t seem to work that way. Visual cues are a major part of taste perception. Patrons at dark restaurants describe an interesting, if somewhat freaky, experience; and many found themselves unable to identify flavors. (Is it chocolate or vanilla? Lettuce or cabbage? Pudding or mashed potatoes?)
While eye-catching color can make for better eating experiences, color can also backfire. Some colors—no matter how gorgeous or unobtrusive in other venues—are just plain off-putting in food. The gray glop doled out to orphans in Oliver Twist may taste ambrosial for all we know, but most of us just can’t get around the fact that it looks like wallpaper paste.
The H.J. Heinz Company, hoping to appeal to kids in 2000-2006, produced a line of ketchups variously colored in green, purple, pink, orange, and blue. Nobody liked them—not even 5-year-olds wanted purple sauce on their French fries—and the company soon dropped the idea and returned to traditional tomato red. We all cheer when the beleaguered narrator of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham finally takes a bite—but, psychologically speaking, we don’t like our eggs (or ham) colored green. Photographer Lawrie Brown’s Colored Food series—a visual exhibit designed to highlight the psychological aspects of color in food—features pictures of luridly purple chocolate sauce, pea-green corn on the cob, and bright-blue roast chicken. It’s pretty, but the thought of eating any of it is awful.
Blue, worldwide, seems to be the planet population’s favorite color—provided it’s not in food. Blue, researchers hypothesize, is commonly associated with spoilage and poison. Nobody wants to eat a blue meatloaf; and studies show that dieters, struggling to cut back on calories, might better do so by tinting their dinners blue.
Color in the garden, on the other hand, is scrumptious. A Summer garden is a riot of color: tomatoes and beets are red; eggplants, purple; carrots, orange; squash and corn, yellow; peppers, broccoli, spinach, and zucchini, several shades of green. And then there are not-quite-so-traditional colors: we’ve also, in our time, grown blue potatoes, purple peppers, yellow-striped tomatoes, white pumpkins. From all, though, that burst of color signals that the stuff we’ve been watering, weeding, fertilizing, and fussing over for the past many weeks is finally—finally—ready to pick and eat.
Color in the garden is not only inherently appealing—I mean, who can look at a ripe tomato without wanting to bite it?—but it’s also good for us. The pigments that give vegetables and fruits all those lip-licking hues are known as phytonutrients; and plants, collectively, make some 25,000 different kinds of these. Plants don’t manufacture them with us in mind; they produce them to protect themselves from munching bugs, invasive bacteria and fungi, and sunburn. It’s just a lucky sideline for us that a diet full of them appears to beef up our immune systems, reduce our risks of cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and cancer, and possibly even protect us from the sort of cognitive decline that leads us to forget where we last left our glasses.
Color isn’t just a feast for the eyes.
But what a gift to us that it also is. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2022, in GreenPrints Issue #130. Illustrations by Chelsea Peters.
The Sweet Smell of Rain
It’s all due to the “jumping dirt”—springtails—in your soil. By Becky Rupp
In the time of silver rain
The earth puts forth new life again
—Langston Hughes
Scientists—who have a tendency to stomp the poetry out of any experience—now know what makes the garden smell so luscious after a rain. That aromatic earthy smell has been known since 1964 as petrichor, from the Greek petros (rock) and ichor (blood of the gods), a linguistic invention of Australian chemists Isabel Bear and Richard Thomas. This may not be the catchiest of names, but—I think we can all agree—it’s still a great improvement over Bear and Thomas’s first try, which was “argillaceous odor.”
Petrichor, scientists tell us, has been around for at least 500 million years—so if you want a good guess as to what the earth smelled like to the dinosaurs, nip outside after a Spring rainfall and take a deep sniff. That’s petrichor: the wonderful smell of green stuff and good rich dirt. And, based on a lot of recent research, we now know just what causes it and why.
The main component of petrichor is a compound called geosmin which, chemists helpfully tell us, is a bicyclic terpene. It’s produced by soil bacteria—notably Streptomyces bacteria, an enormous genus of 500 or more species, a few of which produce anticancer drugs, antifungal agents, and literally dozens of antibiotics which have cured us of everything from conjunctivitis to cholera, tuberculosis, and plague. All of the Streptomyces also make geosmin.
And they make it, it turns out, because of springtails.
Springtails are tiny pinhead-sized bugs that are ubiquitous in soil; you’re doubtless harboring millions of them at this very moment in your backyard compost heap. They’re named for a pogo-stick-like organ on their abdomens which, when released, shoots them into the air. This sounds quite fun and they apparently do this often enough that, collectively, springtails are nicknamed “jumping dirt.” They’ve also got a passion for the scrumptious scent of geosmin—and, incidentally, for the bacteria that produce it, which are a favorite springtail food.
While a biochemical signal that broadcasts “Come eat me!” hardly seems a recipe for survival, the geosmin-generating Streptomyces are actually onto a good thing. Munching springtails are essential for disseminating Streptomyces spores. The spores either trek through the springtails’ digestive tracts, eventually emerging as tiny springtail plops, or stick to their backs—either way eventually moving to new territory and ensuring the continued propagation of Strepomyces colonies. It’s a tiny-sized version of fruit- and berry-gobbling birds spreading undigested seeds across the landscape to produce even more fruits and berries.
Springtails aren’t the only creatures who are attracted by a whiff of geosmin. Camels, who can zero in on oases up to 50 miles away by tracking the scent of geosmin in distant damp earth. We’re no slouches when it comes to geosmin, either. People can sense geosmin at quantities as tiny as 100 parts per trillion. In other words, we’re about 10,000 times more sensitive to geosmin than sharks are to blood.
This isn’t always a good thing.
Take the case of beets.
Beets never rate high on most favored vegetable lists. In fact, they’re generally at rock bottom, along with turnips and Brussels sprouts. (The most popular veggies, almost invariably, are tomatoes, corn, potatoes, and carrots.) People generally don’t like turnips and Brussels sprouts because of their content of bitter-tasting chemicals. These don’t bother some of us, but others are genetically disposed to be abnormally sensitive to them—which means if you’re spurning the sprouts at a holiday dinner, go ahead and blame your genes. Dislike of beets, on the other hand, seems to stem from the fact that they taste like dirt.
And they do taste like dirt. The lush earthy flavor of beets is due to geosmin—in part picked up from geosmin-producing soil bacteria and in part, at least some recent research indicates, made by beets on their own. Many beet-eaters find this delicious—me, for example; I save my vegetable spurning for lima beans—but a touch of mud flavor clearly isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Too much geosmin can make filets of bottom-feeding fish such as catfish taste lousy, and too much geosmin in wine is off-putting. No vintner wants to claim that the latest vintage has subtle hints of dirt, no matter how lovely geosmin may smell after an April shower.
Of all the senses, smell is by far the most evocative. Though the human nose can’t hold a candle to that of the average dog—dogs have about 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, as opposed to a piddling six million for humans—we’re still capable of differentiating among some 10,000 different smells. Furthermore smell, more than any other sense, is capable of calling up vivid memories. From the nose’s olfactory receptors, smell—mediated by volatile molecules in the air—is channeled to the olfactory bulb in the brain, a pod-like structure tucked beneath the cerebral hemispheres, and closely associated with the amygdala—seat of the emotions—and the hippocampus, which functions in learning and memory. Emotion, memory, and smell are a powerful combo. The scents of buttered popcorn, Band-Aids, baby powder, peanut butter—even wet socks—all have the power to call up brilliantly illuminated pieces of our pasts.
Seasons have their own scents, too. Summer smells of roses and hay; Fall of the rich brown organic compounds released by fallen leaves; Winter of woodsmoke and pine.
And Spring smells of green earth after rain, bringing with it memories of little boys in rubber boots, walks under umbrellas, wind in new grass—and many, many gardens. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2022, in GreenPrints Issue #129. Illustrations by Christina Hess.
Feet, Fathoms, and Flamingos
What are most of our measuring units based on? Gardening! (OK, farming.) By Becky Rupp
How much snow? If there’s any measure most prone to exaggeration, inaccuracy, and anecdote, it may be depth of snow—possibly only topped by size of fish, which as anyone who is (or knows) a fisherman is aware, can reach gigantic proportions, especially if said fish got away before being hauled into a boat within reach of a tape measure.
The snow-afflicted tend to describe snow depth in terms of what’s been buried in it—porch steps, mailboxes, fences—or sometimes in terms of how much of it comes over the tops of one’s boots, or occasionally in the historical sense as in “Not as much as the year George lost the car.” My grandparents—who lived in our house long before we did—told “Donner-Party”-like stories of years when the snow was so deep that their groceries were delivered via snowmobile through the upstairs bedroom windows.
In Madison, Wisconsin, a city whose official bird is the pink plastic flamingo, snow depth is commonly calculated in flamingos. A half-flamingo snowfall, for example, which buries the average yard bird up to its tummy, is about a foot and a half deep; a full flamingo, which buries it up to its little pink head, measures about three feet.
The National Weather Service, less romantically, routinely reports snow depth in unadorned inches and feet—that is, in United States customary units, which were originally based on British imperial measures. These last, in their inception, were a little scatty: the British imperial foot, according to at least one story, was first standardized in 1100, based on the foot of Henry I, fourth and youngest son of William the Conqueror. The foot was supposedly measured while encased in Henry’s boot, either to preserve the royal dignity or to make it look bigger than it actually was.
The foot, as a unit of measure, has been around a lot longer than Henry. Stonehenge and the Parthenon, according to archaeologists, were laid out in some version of ancient feet. So was Hadrian’s Wall, built by some 15,000 Roman legionnaires across northern Britain in the second century CE with the hope of intimidating the northern barbarians. Roman engineers relied on paces: five feet to the pace, 1,000 paces to the mile, which meant that there were 5,000 feet per Roman mile, a simple and easy-to-multiply system. We’d all be better off if the Brits had stuck with it.
They didn’t; instead they opted for the furlong.
The furlong—originally furrow-long—was the average length of a plowed furrow in an English medieval field, presumably based on the stretch a team of oxen could plow before pausing to take a breather. It’s equal to about 660 feet, which explains our current-day ungainly 5280-foot mile. Queen Elizabeth I —who was better at languages than math—thought it would be nice to have an eight-furlong mile. To this day, every American mile—think of all those helpful highway how-many-miles-to-the-exit signs—harks back to some medieval peasant planting barley.
And then there’s Gunter’s chain. In 1620, English mathematician Edmund Gunter invented a handy surveyor’s tool—a 100-link chain that (plus handles) measured exactly 66 feet, or one-tenth of a furlong. (Gunter was also known for inventing an early version of the slide rule, devising an improved sextant, coining the trigonometric term cosine, and writing a catchy treatise on the crossbow.) Pioneer fences were measured in chains; the modern city block is based on Gunter’s chain—4 chains per block; and the awkward American acre of 43,560 square feet (10 square chains) is, at heart, all the fault of furrows and exhausted medieval oxen.
Measurement, in other words, traditionally had a lot to do with people planting stuff.
Depth—as in huge piles of snow—might more traditionally be measured in fathoms. The original fathom was a measure from the tip of the middle finger on one hand to the tip of the other with arms extended—or about six feet. (Try it.) Commonly it was used in a nautical sense to measure depth of water; when Shakespeare in The Tempest wrote “Full fathom five thy father lies,” he meant 30 feet down.
So—how much snow? There’s more to measuring snow, it turns out, than simply sticking a yardstick into the nearest handy drift. For one thing, you want to avoid measuring snow depth on grass because air caught between the blades makes it look like there’s more snow than there actually is. A flat surface is best—for example, the picnic table that you neglected to drag in last Fall—provided it’s not sitting under a tree or subject to howling winds.
The National Weather Service uses a device called a snow board for their professional snow measurements. This is exactly what it sounds like—a board—set flat on the ground and marked with a couple of handy stakes so that shivering meteorologists can (hopefully) locate it post-storm. (The same clever trick applies here in Vermont so that the fuel truck driver can find our buried propane tank.) Recommended snow-board technique is to measure every six hours, sweeping (or shoveling) the board clean between samples. This prevents too much snow from accumulating, settling, and compacting, which makes it look like there’s less snow than there actually was, which is a big deal if you’re planning to boast about the awfulness of your blizzard.
Not everybody appreciates snow.
Skiers, of course, revel in it, and the more the better; teachers and kids alike get a thrill out of unexpected snow days; and almost everybody loves a white Christmas. On the negative side are treacherous roads and a lot of back-breaking shoveling, plus—face it —the stuff is really cold. “Winter is icumen in,” wrote poet Ezra Pound. “Lhude sing Goddamn.”
But look at it from the garden’s point of view.
A hefty blanket of snow acts as a cozy insulator, protecting buried roots from the worst of freezing temperatures; and snow—traditionally nicknamed the “poor man’s fertilizer”—carries with it a useful dose of nitrogen, an element essential for plant growth. According to one estimate, snow adds as much as 12 pounds of absorbable nitrogen per acre to soil—which may not be a lot as fertilizer goes, but it certainly can’t hurt.
In other words, don’t despair. No matter how frightful the Winter weather, snow—whether if falls on your ground in inches, feet, fathoms, or flamingos—is the beginning of next Spring’s garden.
With a potential crop—measure them!—of truly impressive tomatoes, zucchinis, and pumpkins. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2021, in GreenPrints Issue #128. Illustrations by Blanche Derby.
Tommy Tucker and Company
Squirrels: pets, pests—and planters. By Becky Rupp
Name a famous squirrel.
Go on, try.
And just for an extra challenge, make it a real-life squirrel.
Which rules out Beatrix Potter’s (obnoxious) Squirrel Nutkin; C.S. Lewis’s (gallant) Pattertwig; and Scrat, the hyperactive saber-toothed squirrel of the movie Ice Age (2002). Also, Melanie Watts’ Scaredy Squirrel, the terrified hero of a picture-book series, who cringes in his tree primed with everything from Band-Aids to a parachute, preparing to deal with Martians, sharks, poison ivy, and killer bees; and Kate DiCamillo’s Ulysses, a squirrel who—after a near-disastrous encounter with a vacuum cleaner—develops superpowers.
Fictional squirrels aren’t hard to find. Famous actual squirrels, on the other hand, are scarce on the ground.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, squirrels were popular pets, paraded by the wealthy on gold-chain leashes and housed in tin-lined cages with running wheels. Or allowed, not always successfully, to run loose around the house: Georgianna Shipley’s Mungo, done in by a dog in 1772, was immortalized in a eulogy by no less than Benjamin Franklin (“Alas! Poor Mungo!”). Franklin offered, in a kindly P.S., to send her another squirrel.
Presidents Warren Harding and Harry Truman both had pet squirrels—both named Pete—and among Teddy Roosevelt’s multitudinous pets, which included a badger named Josiah and a bear named Jonathan Edwards, was a flying squirrel that came to meals riding in various Roosevelt children’s pockets.
More recently we’ve had the Banff Crasher Squirrel, who showed up in 2009 in a camping couple’s selfie and became a viral meme on social media—eventually sharing pictures with the Beatles, JFK, Abe Lincoln, Neil Armstrong (on the moon), and George Washington (crossing the Delaware). For a while there was even a Squirrelizer website that allowed you to add the Crasher Squirrel to your own home photos.
Equally famous was the Purple Squirrel, captured in a backyard in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania in 2012. No one ever figured out just why the squirrel was purple, but before he was released back into the wild, he became an internet sensation, acquired a personal Facebook page, and inspired a country-music song entitled “Thor, the Purple Squirrel from the Jersey Shore.”
If you’d been around in the 1940s, however, you would have known at least one squirrel by name. Tommy Tucker, a male gray squirrel, was adopted in 1942 as an infant—a stage known to squirrel experts as a kitten—by Zaidee Bullis of Washington, DC. Zaidee made Tommy a Bullis family pet, providing him with a tiny bed, a room full of miniature toys, and a vast wardrobe of all-female clothes, since it was impossible to fit Tommy’s bushy tail into pants. During the war years, Tommy skyrocketed to fame, touring schools and military hospitals (decked out, for the latter, in a squirrel-sized Red Cross uniform) and contributing to the war effort by advertising war bonds.
Pilots, from whom he received fan mail, carried Tommy’s picture into battle. He was featured in Life magazine, appeared in a short film made by Paramount, and shared a radio broadcast with FDR. By 1945, the national Tommy Tucker Club had 30,000 members. If he’d been around ten years later, he doubtless would have given Mickey Mouse a run for his money on TV.
Gardeners, by and large, are not fans of squirrels. In fact—forget the Tommy Tucker Club—most are more in tune with Sarah Jessica Parker, who once announced that a squirrel is just a rat with a cuter outfit. She’s right, of course: all those fuzzy and frisky squirrels are rodents, cousins of rats, mice, chipmunks, and prairie dogs. As such, this means that they have typical rodent teeth: namely a double set of chisel-shaped incisors, with which the squirrel incessantly gnaws.
To be fair, he or she has to gnaw: rodent incisors grow continually throughout life, at the rate of about six inches per year, which means that they must be continually worn down by chewing on something. If a squirrel doesn’t gnaw, his/her teeth will continue to grow, curving inward, until they penetrate the upper and lower jaws, which is something a squirrel will do practically anything to avoid. Particularly desperate squirrels have been known to gnaw on bones, discarded deer antlers, and turtle shells—and sometimes, unwisely, on electrical wires, an act that almost always ends badly for the squirrel.
Foodwise, the average squirrel gnaws through about two pounds of food a week. Traditionally this consists of nuts, which is fine with me; and I sort of enjoy all the machinations they go through to nab the sunflower seeds in the bird feeders.
But there are limits.
Just this past year squirrels dug up and ate (ate!) all the daffodil bulbs and garlic cloves that we’d planted in the Fall, and—insult to injury—chewed huge and unsightly holes in the faces of our Halloween pumpkins.
To say nothing of what they did over the Summer to the plum tomatoes.
It’s hard to discourage squirrels. Gardeners’ anti-squirrel ploys include mint oil, cayenne pepper, disco balls, battery-powered fly swatters, electrified fences, and dogs (re: Mungo); and hardcore squirrel opponents recommend that you simply trap and eat lots of them. This last solution is particularly popular in Britain, where American gray squirrels—imported in the 1870s—have been steadily edging out the indigenous red squirrels. Accordingly, a Save Our Squirrels campaign, with the motto “Save a red, eat a gray!,” has led to a patriotic boom in British (gray) squirrel cuisine. Think squirrel curry.
Squirrel, on our side of the pond, is traditionally the prime component of Brunswick stew, a dish of uncertain but contentious origin, which—along with the squirrel—contains corn, beans, tomatoes, and (in upscale versions) a splash of Madeira. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were said to be fond of it.
Pesky as they are, though, I don’t want to eat our squirrels.
I figure they deserve some tolerance. Tommy Tucker, after all, did his bit for World War II; and—owing to their habit of burying nuts and then forgetting about some of them—foresters guess that squirrels are responsible each year for planting thousands, if not millions, of new trees.
Which, when it comes right down to it, seems a more than fair exchange for a dozen tomatoes, a few pumpkins, and even a plot of daffodils. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2021, in GreenPrints Issue #127. Illustrations by Blanche Derby.
Buried Treasure
Does some secretly lie in your garden? By Becky Rupp
Is anybody—other than me, that is—a fan of the BBC series “Dectorists”? The show centers around the adventures of Lance and Andy (Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook) of Britain’s (wholly imaginary) Danebury Metal Detecting Club. The club members, armed with metal detectors, obsessively comb the landscape searching for treasure, which they almost never find. They do, however, turn up a lot of bottle caps and buttons, and during the credits at the end of every episode there’s a fleeting view of the incredible possibilities: a below-earth scan of a treasure-laden Anglo-Saxon ship buried practically beneath Lance and Andy’s feet. It’s a great series with a satisfying ending about which I’m not going to tell you. (It’s complicated.) But it involves gold.
Who doesn’t dream of finding buried treasure?
And people do periodically find it, just while digging in their gardens.
Just this past year, gardeners in Hampshire in southern England—spading up soil for planting season—found a hoard of medieval gold and silver coins. The coins were dated to the late 15th and early 16th centuries and spanned the reigns of five British kings: Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III, Henry VII, and Henry VIII. Most of the coins were gold angels—so-called because on one side they feature a picture of the Archangel Michael killing a (smallish) dragon. There were four particularly rare Tudor coins in the stash, which promptly made the news: gold crowns variously bearing the initials of Henry VIII’s first three wives—Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Jane Seymour—along with the signature Tudor rose. (No coins were ever dedicated to Henry’s last three wives; perhaps by then the royal mint had despaired of keeping pace with his rate of marital turnover.) The coins, at the time they were buried—sometime around 1540—would have been worth about $18,000 in modern money, then a fortune.
One guess, by coin expert John Naylor from the Ashmolean Museum, is that the hoard was buried by a clergyman in the wake of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. Henry, who abandoned the Roman Catholic Church in 1534 in order to marry Anne Boleyn, ordered all English monasteries disbanded, with their lands and wealth reverting to the Crown—that is, going straight into Henry’s perennially empty pockets. It’s not a bad assumption that perhaps the Hampshire coins were buried to keep them out of the paws of the rapacious king.
Other finds have been even more impressive. In 2012, a gardener in Ackworth, England unearthed a pottery jar containing nearly 600 gold coins and a gold ring inscribed with the phrase “When this you see, remember me.” The hoard was dated to the time of the English Civil War, a mid-17th-century clash between the supporters of the king (the Cavaliers) and the Puritan backers of Oliver Cromwell (the Roundheads)—a fraught period during which the cautious might well have buried their savings for safekeeping.
In 2004, Ken Allen of Thornbury, in the process of digging a pond in his backyard garden, found a cache of 11,450 Roman coins dating to the third century; and in 2020, a birdwatcher, tramping through a farmer’s field while tracking a pair of magpies, kicked up a Celtic gold coin. He dashed home for his metal detector and soon found a copper pot crammed with 1300 gold staters dating to 40-50 CE, when the redheaded Queen Boudica was battling the invading Romans. The editors of Treasure Hunting magazine—yes, there’s an entire magazine devoted to treasure hunting—suggest that the hoard may have been a war chest, intended to help fund Boudica’s military campaigns.
American gardeners aren’t likely to strike it rich on Celtic staters or Tudor gold crowns, but our situation isn’t hopeless. Treasure happens even here. In 2014, a Northern California couple unearthed eight tin cans in their backyard, each packed with mint-condition 19th century gold coins—valued today at a grand total of $10 million.
So let’s say you happen upon a pot—or eight cans—of gold while you’re crawling around in your vegetable plot planting turnips. Can you keep it?
It’s a question that has bedeviled treasure hunters since at least the time of the Romans. It turns out that Romans, by law, could keep half of any discovered treasure: that is, if you, a Roman citizen, stumbled upon a crate of silver ingots while prowling about the Coliseum, half went to you and the other half to the emperor.
Today it’s a bit more complicated. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the Treasure Act of 1996 defines “treasure” as anything made of gold or silver that’s more than 300 years old. Anything that meets that definition by law belongs to the Crown—though the Crown, to foster good relationships with treasure hunters and archaeologists, routinely pays finders the full market value of their discoveries. (This isn’t a perfect system: a bronze Roman parade helmet, dug up in Cumbria in 2010, didn’t meet the legal definition of treasure, and so—to the dismay of scientists and museums—was auctioned off to a private collector.)
In the United States, treasure hunting—provided you don’t do it on federal property, which is a felony and can land you in jail—is pretty much a matter of finders-keepers. Laws vary a bit from state to state, but generally speaking, if you find a chest of doubloons in your tomato patch, it’s all yours. (If it’s a rental tomato patch, it’s just half yours—you have to split it with the property owner.)
So far our garden has been a bust for buried treasure. I’ve been digging in it for years, and the most exciting finds to date have been a lot of rocks, a piece of a teacup, and a couple of Lego bricks (Lance and Andy would sympathize)—though there’s a lot to be said for our annual harvest of carrots, potatoes, onions, and beets. After all, people need vegetables. Robinson Crusoe, stranded on his desert island with a parcel of gold and silver retrieved from his wrecked ship, said that he would gladly have traded the whole thing for a handful of peas and beans (and a bottle of ink). It’s important to keep our priorities straight. Treasure is as treasure does. After all, you can’t eat doubloons.
Still, I can’t help hoping.
It’s known for a fact that Samuel de Champlain passed by our way in 1609 with a flotilla of 24 canoes. Wouldn’t you think some long-ago French explorer might—just possibly—have left behind a little bag of gold? ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2021, in GreenPrints Issue #126. Illustrations by Linda Cook Devona.
Here Comes the Sun
Hang in there, it’s coming. By Becky Rupp
The Earth is askew.
Our planet is tipped sideways, an off-kilter condition that my granddad would have described as cattywampus.
I know this for a fact because I see the effects every year from my back porch.
In summer the sun sets due west of us over Lake Champlain and spends most of the afternoon shining in our kitchen windows—and, incidentally, spends the lion’s share of the day scattering rays on the garden. In Winter it sets way to the south down past the Alburgh bridge and barely shines on us at all. The reason we have to start our tomato seedlings under grow lights is because the Earth—unlike decent straight-up-and-down planets like Mercury or Venus—lolls back on its axis to the tune of 23.4 degrees.
That axial tilt is the reason why Vermont is freezing in February. Seasons are the fault of tilt. Tilt, in seasonal order as the Earth revolves around the sun, gives us crocuses, zucchini, red leaves, and snowmen. It makes for an interesting planet, but—at least in our sun-deprived household—it has awful effects on infant vegetables and houseplants.
The annual return of the sun in Spring after the cold, dark Winter historically has always been a big deal. After the Winter solstice on December 21st—the shortest day of the year—each successive day packs on an extra two minutes or so of sunlight, heading toward the Spring equinox, when day and night are of equal length. In Celtic tradition, the Spring equinox is dedicated to the fertility goddess Ostara, whose sacred animal was the hare—from which, eventually, evolved the far more approachable and cuddly Easter bunny. Perversely, hare hunting was a popular Easter activity in medieval England—which just seems wrong, given the hare’s exalted antecedents. Occasionally, however, the medieval bunny apparently turned the tables: the Smithfield Decretals, a gorgeously illuminated 13th-century manuscript with text by Pope Gregory IX, includes a picture of retaliatory rabbits armed with bows, arrows, and clubs hunting people.
In Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the Spring equinox marks the festival of Nowruz, the beginning of the new year. Celebrants grow dishes of wheatgrass, leap over bonfires, eat cookies, and play buzkashi—a game on horseback similar to polo, except that a goat carcass is used in lieu of a ball. Druids flock to Stonehenge on the equinox to watch the sun rise over the Heel Stone. And in Poland—which apparently has a climate much like that of northern Vermont—kids make straw effigies of Marzanna, the Winter goddess, and either set her on fire or throw her in the river.
This last is a rite I can get my head around. By the spring equinox here, the lake is still frozen; there’s still snow on the ground; everybody’s sick of wearing boots; and we’re all more than ready to torch Marzanna and dance on her ashes. We want some sun.
Sunshine, researchers tell us, has a bevy of biological and psychological bennies. It makes us cheerfuller, reduces stress, and cuts the risk of heart attacks, strokes, skin complaints, and certain cancers. It also alleviates aches and pains, improves memory, and—at least if you get up early enough in the morning to admire it—can even help us lose weight.
Deprived of sunshine, some of us get flat-out miserable. About 20 percent of people suffer from some form of seasonal affective disorder—a malady appropriately abbreviated as SAD—which is depression triggered by the dismal low light levels of winter. Treatment generally is phototherapy, which involves sitting next to a box that gives off a bright light that mimics sunshine. An alternative cure, if you can afford it, is a long vacation in the Bahamas.
The biological effects of sunshine are largely due to vitamin D—famous for promoting the health of bones, but also important for a wide range of essential activities involving an enormous number of genes. Nicknamed the “sunshine vitamin,” D is produced when ultraviolet B (UVB) rays from sunlight hit our skin. In Summer, when we’re all running around outside in shorts, producing enough D to keep us going is a piece of cake. In the Winter, when we’re bundled up to the eyeballs and there’s no sun in sight, it’s next to impossible.
According to Harvard Health Publishing, when it comes to vitamin D, anybody living north of the 37th parallel—that is, above the latitude of Richmond, Virginia—is pretty much out of luck during the cold months. The solution, scientists tell us, is to stop whining, eat fatty fish, and take vitamin pills.
Still, there’s a lot more to sun than vitamin D—and even more to it than the fact that it makes our gardens grow.
In the later days of the Roman Empire, the sun god was known as Sol Invictus—the Invincible Sun. He was the patron of soldiers, who hoped for similar invincibility; and his festival was celebrated on or about December 25, as the days once again began to lengthen—proving that Winter was on its way out and there was no defeating the sun.
The annual return of the sun, as long as there have been people to watch for it, has been a sign of hope and joy, an affirmation that we’ve lived through the worst and a better future is just around the corner.
The lesson of the returning sun is that the bleak days never last forever. The good—even though it sometimes seems a long time coming—is invincible. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2021, in GreenPrints Issue #125. Illustrations by Linda Cook Devona.
Persnickety Pineapples
The $8,000 fruit? Oh, my! By Becky Rupp
Some years back I was given a book about how to grow windowsill plants from kitchen scraps. Practically everything that you’re preparing to toss into the compost bin, says my book, can—with a little creativity and care—be turned into brand-new plants: carrot tops, scallion roots, garlic cloves, squash seeds, and even things that ordinarily wouldn’t be caught dead sprouting in Vermont, like pomegranates and papayas.
This wasn’t as easy in practice as the book made it sound, at least for me. I managed to sprout a few lemon seeds—which, so far, show no sign of developing into lemon trees; avocados were a bust; and so were pineapples which, at least according to my book, should have been a walk in the park. All you do to grow your very own pineapple is cut the top off an existing one, stick it in soil in a pot, and water it. My pineapples, however, clearly knew they were in a hostile environment. They weren’t having any. I couldn’t really blame them. From our windowsills, you can see snow.
Historically, a lot of people have been defeated by pineapples.
The pineapple is a native of South America, though by the 15th century, when Columbus arrived, it had spread north through Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean islands. Columbus happened upon it in 1493 on the island of Guadaloupe. According to his log, he and his men came upon it in a deserted village. The perspicacious natives, spotting the foreigners, had fled to the hills, leaving behind calabashes filled with fruits that to the Spaniards looked like enormous “green pine cones.” Columbus pronounced them delicious.
The few pineapples that made it back to Europe—most rotted in transit—created a sensation. Only the very rich could afford them, and a pineapple, crowning a pyramid of fruit on an after-dinner banquet table, was the ultimate sign of status and luxury. Today it’s yachts and gold bathroom fixtures; in the 17th century, it was pineapples.
Even the very wealthiest, however, couldn’t always get them. The slow-ripening fruits were nearly impossible to grow in Europe, where the climate was neither warm nor humid enough to suit them. In the 1670s, England’s King Charles II famously had his portrait painted showing the Royal Gardener kneeling at his feet and presenting him with a pineapple. (Whatever the implication, this certainly wasn’t homegrown fruit. We know that Charles ordered his pineapples from Barbados.) The first all-English pineapples were only produced some 40 years later by Henry Telende, a gardener on an estate in Richmond. Telende’s technique involved nurturing the plants under cold frames in pits packed with manure and tanner’s bark—an oak bark used in leather tanning. When soaked in water, tanner’s bark fermented slowly, generating a constant, comforting, electric-blanket-like heat.
It wasn’t easy growing pineapples: especially in the early 1700s during the Little Ice Age, a period of ultra-cold winters, so cold Londoners held festivals on the frozen Thames.
The real secret to providing pineapples with a congenial home away from home was a greenhouse. Greenhouses of one kind or another date back to Roman times—the earliest seem to have been carts covered with oiled cloth, on which the Emperor Tiberius’s gardeners grew cucumbers. But in the 17th century, the Dutch held the lead in state-of-the-art greenhouse building. (Reportedly, the Dutch had produced pineapples in their greenhouses as early as 1680.) Inspired, soon everyone who was anyone across the continent had leaped on the pineapple bandwagon and was scrambling to build greenhouses—called pineries if exclusively devoted to pineapples.
Pineapple motifs were ubiquitous. Pineapples appeared in stone on gateposts, in wood on staircase finials, and in metal on weathervanes; pineapples were woven into carpets and table-cloths, printed on wallpaper, and painted on chairs. John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore—the last colonial governor of Virginia—put a roof on his Scottish Summer house in the shape of a gigantic pineapple. Men carried pineapple-shaped snuffboxes. Wedgewood produced a line of pineapple-decorated china and Staffordshire made pineapple teapots. “No garden is now thought complete,” wrote one 18th-century botanist, “without a stove for raising of pine-apples.”
The American colonists were equally taken with the high-status pineapple. George Washington, who first tasted them at the age of 19 while on a trip to Barbados with his brother Lawrence, ordered pineapples by the dozen for the table at Mount Vernon. Americans, however, didn’t throw themselves into pineapple cultivation with the fervor of their European neighbors. In the days leading up to the Revolutionary War, the colonists were boycotting the importation of British goods, among them an essential component of greenhouses: glass.
The Townshend Acts—named for Charles Townshend, British Chancellor of the Exchequer—took effect in 1767, charging import duties on items the British hoped the colonists would be unable to produce on their own: glass, china, lead, paint, paper, and tea. The revenues were intended to help pay for the crushing cost of the recently concluded French and Indian War and to show the colonists—who had a distressing bent for disrespect and disobedience—who was boss. Americans protested vociferously. In the fraught political climate, pineapples—viewed as suspect British luxury goods—dropped from sight as social desirables.
Raising a pineapple was expensive. The fruits could take two years or more to ripen. The constant care, plus the coal needed to heat the pineapple-encasing greenhouses, meant that each fruit, by the time it was ready to pick, was worth an estimated $8,000 in today’s money. Those who managed to acquire one of these often didn’t eat it. Instead, it was displayed for as long as possible in order to maximize social cachet before it began to go bad. Sometimes a single pineapple was shared among friends, who passed it from dinner to dinner and house to house—though the servants tasked with delivering the valuable pineapple were frequently targets of thieves. And pinching a pineapple was serious business. Those who got caught were subject to deportation and seven years of hard labor.
The less well-off but still socially ambitious could rent a pine-apple for special occasions from one of the many pineapple rental shops that sprang up across Britain at the height of the craze. For a small, affordable sum, you could show off the pineapple for an evening, bask in its reflected glory, and then sneakily return it in the morning.
Which to me, given my experience with persnickety, if not downright resentful, pineapples, sounds like a really good idea. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2020, in GreenPrints Issue #124. Illustrations by Blanche Derby.
Good Chemistry
Chlorophyll gives us food—and food for thought. By Becky Rupp
According to Kermit the Frog, it’s not easy being green. His sad point was that—being green—you blend, wallflower-like, into the background and everybody passes you by. Green means ignored, neglected, and invisible.
Well, maybe. Personally, I think green is a stand-out. After all, dollar bills, Ireland, and Vermont’s mountains (these last two at least for a couple of months of the year) are all green. So is the Statue of Liberty, which was a bright copper color, shiny as a new penny, when it arrived in New York in 1885—though by 1906, reactions with the New York air had turned it green. The Grinch, Oscar the Grouch, and the Jolly Green Giant are all green. And Napoleon—no slouch at grabbing the limelight—claimed green was his favorite color.
Biochemically, on the other hand, Kermit is right on. From the science end, being green is no walk in the park.
As we were all taught in school, plants have it way up on us because they can make their own food—just by sitting there pointing themselves skyward and using nothing but water, sunshine, and carbon dioxide. They do this with the help of a green pigment called chlorophyll, which is what makes grass, lettuce, spinach, and unripe tomatoes green. The process is called photosynthesis.
Simple, right?
If you ever need to declare a favorite chemical reaction—just in case you’re ever asked in some malevolent board game—make it photosynthesis. It’s the reason we’re all alive.
Immediately, however, this gets sticky. First, chlorophyll is complicated. Its basic chemical formula is C55H72O5N4Mg—a grand total of 137 atoms—and it’s not easy to put together. It takes well over a dozen complicated steps and a host of enzymes to synthesize the stuff.
Then, just to make matters worse, there’s not just one chlorophyll—there are six different kinds of chlorophyll, creatively known as a, b, c, d, e, f, and g. And yes, I know: that looks like seven kinds of chlorophyll. The problem is chlorophyll e, which is passionately defended by some scientists as an actual chemical and derided by the rest as a silly experimental goof. We’re not yet committed to chlorophyll e.
Each of these chlorophylls absorbs different wavelengths of light. The two of most interest to gardeners, are chlorophyll a—a flashy bluish-green pigment—and chlorophyll b, a muted, but attractive, olive. A and b are what make our gardens grow.
Despite all it does for us, most of us don’t put a lot of thought into chlorophyll. Its last—and possibly only—leap to fame occurred in the 1940s, when an Irish entrepreneur named O’Neill Ryan set off a chlorophyll craze.
Ryan was piggybacking on research done in the 1930s by Benjamin Gruskin, a respectable scientist at Temple University, who had developed a water-soluble form of chlorophyll that he hoped would be an all-purpose treatment for infections. It wasn’t; it flopped as medicine, to be quickly replaced by the far more effective antibiotics. But Ryan—who took out a use patent on Gruskin’s discovery in 1945—was convinced that chlorophyll was the end-all answer to combatting evil smells.
His first product was a chlorophyll-based toothpaste, marketed by Pepsodent in 1950 as the (bright green) Chlorodent. He followed up with green dog food, chewing gum, deodorant, cigarettes, soap, shampoo, popcorn, diapers, and socks. All sold like hotcakes. Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli jumped on the bandwagon and invented a chlorophyll-based cologne.
Then—like Godzilla stomping on Bambi—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that scientific experiments had failed to show that chlorophyll had any deodorizing effects whatsoever; and the Journal of the American Medical Association nastily pointed out that goats, which practically live on chlorophyll, smell awful.
Chlorophyll then dropped from the public eye and went back to quietly feeding the planet.
Which brings us to where chlorophyll came from in the first place.
At some point two billion years ago or so, an early cell cozied up to a tiny cyanobacterium—a teeny green bacterial cell stuffed with chlorophyll and capable of photosynthesis—and swallowed it. This ancient get-together—a process now known to biologists as endosymbiosis—turned out to be the greatest win-win in history. The gulped-up cyanobacteria provided their host cells with food and energy; cells, in turn, gave cyanobacteria a safe and comfy place to live. This beautiful friendship—the biological equivalent of that great end scene in Casablanca when Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walk off into the mist together—was the kickoff for the evolution of everything from duckweed to oak trees, basil, and beets.
All our gardens came from there.
We’ve got a long history of supportive pairs. Sherlock Holmes, for all his smarts, needed Watson. Calvin needed Hobbes. Batman needed Robin; Abbott would have been a flop without Costello; and who can imagine Bert without Ernie or Bambi without Thumper?
Right now, when our country is so beset by hostility and division, I can’t help thinking about that ancient and serendipitous act of cooperation that made our lives—and our gardens—possible. Together we can do far greater things that we can ever do on our own.
That’s good chemistry. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2020, in GreenPrints Issue #123. Illustrations by Blanche Derby.
Victory Gardens
Gardening in the city—now that’s a victory. By Becky Rupp
Just to be clear here, I’m not a city gardener.
I live in the country. The closest city to us, here in far northern Vermont, is Burlington (population 42,000) which our oldest son, who lives in New York City (population 8.6 million), tells us barely deserves the name. When it comes to gardening, all I have to do is walk out the front door to find someplace to dig. If we had the time, energy, and inclination, we’ve got room for an acre of potatoes, a turnip field, and a couple of cows. Granted, I could do with a little less clay and a lot fewer rocks—this is, after all, Vermont—but the truth is that gardening, where we live, practically falls in our laps.
Not like all those city gardeners, who have to blast a hole in concrete to plant a tomato.
There’s a surprisingly lush literature on city gardening, and all of it describes the triumph of hope, optimism, and determination over great and awful odds. Take, for example, Rumer Godden’s now-classic An Episode of Sparrows, first published in 1955. The book’s main character is young Lovejoy Mason, a street kid from South London, who nicks a package of cornflower seeds and starts a garden in the rubble of a church that was destroyed in the Blitz. Rubble is lousy ground for plants, so Lovejoy’s passion for her hidden garden ropes in other kids from the neighborhood—notably Tip Malone, leader of the local gang of boys—and leads to stealing dirt from a local private park. But eventually—because of that charmer of a garden—there’s a wonderful and much-deserved happy ending.
Paul Fleischman’s Seedfolks begins with Kim, a young Vietnamese girl, planting six bean seeds in a vacant lot in Cleveland—which eventually inspires her neighbors, a multi-age and multiracial collection of people, all with different issues and problems—to collaborate in creating a supportive community garden. Sarah Stewart’s The Gardener is the picture-book story of young Lydia Grace Finch, shipped off during the Depression to help her Uncle Jim at his city bakery, where she ultimately makes her dour uncle smile by planting a marvelous roof-top garden in pots, tubs, and boxes.
And in Peter Brown’s picture book The Curious Garden—a great birthday-present pick for kids of every gardening parent and grandparent—young Liam finds a wilting wild-flower growing beside an abandoned railroad track and sets out to take care of it. As he experiments and learns, his small garden grows and blooms, spreading in both directions along the empty track—until an entire grim and lifeless city is gradually transformed into a vibrant green growing space.
Brown’s book was inspired by New York City’s real-life High Line, once an elevated railroad track on Manhattan’s West Side. After the rise of trucking put railroads out of business in the 1950s, the track was abandoned, and by the 80s was in danger of demolition. Protests, fundraising, and support from a lot of influential and wealthy people saved it and converted it into a one-and-a-half-mile-long, plant-filled park. This ultimately cost $153 million—a bit of a stretch from Liam and his red rubber boots and watering can, but you get the idea.
Urban gardeners, barring multimillionaire patrons, pretty much have two choices: pots or vacant lots.
The idea of planting gardens on vacant city lots dates to World War I, when the National War Garden Commission started urging people to plant vegetables in every available space, with the aim of alleviating the food shortage crisis in Europe. Over 5,000,000 people did so; and 25 years later, when food rationing hit during World War II, some 15,000,000 families picked up spades again and planted victory gardens. Boston Common and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park turned themselves into urban farms, and Eleanor Roosevelt—despite protest from the U.S. Department of Agriculture—planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Citizens of New York City collectively planted 400,000 victory gardens, including one along Park Avenue and another on Riverside Drive. The result was some 200 million pounds of tomatoes, beans, beets, carrots, lettuce, and Swiss chard.
Nowadays urban gardeners are more likely to be driven by a desire for healthful and local eating and sustainable lifestyles than by wartime food shortages. Restaurants maintain indoor herb gardens for their customers; hospitals plant rooftop gardens for their patients; families plant tomatoes and peppers in flowerpots on their balconies. Communities pitch in—Seedfolks-style—to turn vacant lots into raised-bed group gardens. According to the USDA, about 15% of the world’s food supply is now grown in cities.
Which in my opinion is no small feat. There’s more to victory than cabbages for World War II.
Aesop’s Fables are a collection of short stories with helpful moral end-tags, generally (though possibly erroneously) attributed to Aesop, a storytelling slave from ancient Greece in the sixth century BCE. Among these is the tale of the Country Mouse and the Town Mouse, in which Country Mouse gets the Aesopian seal of approval. In the story, the two mice visit back and forth. Sophisticated Town Mouse finds the country uncivilized and the food dull; far-less-cool Country Mouse finds the town awesome and the food scrumptious—but town is populated by terrifying and life-threatening cats and dogs. The take-away lesson is that peace and safety, even with awful cooking, are preferable to stress and danger, accompanied by a feast.
Well, maybe. But now imagine those mice as gardeners.
There’s Country Mouse, in overalls, sitting on the back porch, sipping lemonade, placidly growing beans. And then there’s Town Mouse fending off cats, dogs, rats, traffic, pedestrians, vandals, gravel, asphalt, skyscrapers, and city ordinances while struggling to nurture every sprouting lettuce leaf. Country Mouse is my kind of people—but, from a garden standpoint, Town Mouse is a hero.
More than 100,000 square miles of the U.S. is urban, a number that’s expected to triple during the next three decades—but due to city gardeners, more and more of that urban space is turning green. Detroit, Michigan—home to a depressing 200,000 abandoned lots—now has over 1300 community gardens. Chicago (city of Al Capone) is promoting rooftop farms, apiaries, and farmers markets. Boston (worst highway congestion in the country) encourages vacant-lot and rooftop gardens, and lets city-dwellers raise chickens and bees.
Gardening in the city is a triumph over odds that those of us in the laid-back boonies never come up against. You’ve got to give a lot of credit to those city gardeners, doggedly planting where, by all rights, no garden is supposed to grow, fighting off pavement, trash, and taxi exhaust.
Those city gardens—they’re all victory gardens. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2020, in GreenPrints Issue #122. Illustrations by Christina Hess.
Getting By With the Help of Our Friends
We could learn something—from trees. By Becky Rupp
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
—From Philip Larkin, “The Trees”
There’s no getting around the fact that these days we’re a divided nation. This year, everybody’s Thanksgiving feast and Christmas dinner almost certainly took a hit from who—politically—supports who and why and who, just as passionately, doesn’t and why not. Even our family, usually largely in accord, got a little scratchy this year as to who was most thankful for what, and who wasn’t thankful for much of anything at all.
I get that. These are tough times.
Sometimes we just don’t agree.
But that doesn’t mean—when push comes to shove—that we’re not all on the same page. We’ve got a lot to learn here from plants.
But let’s start from the beginning. Just like us, not all plants get along.
Walnut trees, for example, can be down-right mean.
The brown pigment found in walnut twigs, leaves, bark, roots, and nut hulls is called juglone—a chemical whose primary function is to kill encroaching neighbors. This murderous method of maintaining personal space is known to scientists as allelopathy, and it’s been known—or at least noticed—since ancient times. People, from the get-go, were wise to the selfish and self-promoting behavior of walnut trees. Pliny the Elder, in the first century C.E., wrote “The shadow of walnut trees is poison to all plants within its compass, and it kills whatever it touches.”
Walnut trees aren’t the only ones. Given the possibility of aggressive trees, many herbaceous plants fight back with their own takes on chemical warfare. Asters and goldenrod are toxic to yellow poplar and Virginia pine; ragweed, hawkweed, timothy grass, and buttercups attack sugar maples. Broomsedge—a tough and weedy grass—inhibits black locust seedlings. It’s also toxic to young walnuts, which shows that walnuts, though they may be the bullies on the botanic block, don’t always get their own way.
All this attack and counterattack sounds—sadly—an awful lot like us.
But there’s another side to the story.
Peter Wohlleben, German forester and author of The Hidden Life of Trees, argues that trees, rather than being disconnected loners, are members of interconnected supportive communities. And there’s some science to back him up.
Trees bond through what scientists call a mycorrhizal network—that is, a massive underground network of fungal filaments connecting trees root to root throughout a forest. This partnership is a win-win for everybody. Fungi get food in the form of sugars from the tree’s photosynthesizing leaves. About 30% of a tree’s sugar goes to feed its fungi, and fungi, in turn, help the tree absorb more water and nutrients from the soil than it would be able to suck up on its own.
Some trees—nicknamed mother or hub trees—are exceptionally good at this, each functioning as a sort of arboreal soup kitchen. These are the biggest and oldest trees in the forest, the ones with the most widespread roots and the most extensive collection of helpful fungi. These are able to sense when surrounding young saplings are struggling, and to mobilize the fungal net to send the kids extra doses of nutrients.
Some plants would flatly starve to death without the mycorrhizal net. For example, Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), a bizarre relative of blueberries and rhododendrons, is pure white, for which reason it’s sometimes called the ghost flower or corpse plant. Since it contains no chlorophyll, it can’t make its own food via photosynthesis—which means it would be up a creek if it weren’t for the sugars provided for it via subterranean fungi. And it’s not alone. It’s estimated that some 400 other chlorophyll-less plants survive with help from fungal friends.
Trees also appear to communicate by sending chemical, hormonal, or electrical signals through the myccorhizal network, sounding alarms about such impending disasters as drought or invading beetles. Wohlleben—whose English is good enough to make awful puns—calls this fungal telegraph system the wood-wide web. Forests, many scientists now believe, function like hippie communes or insect colonies, with all members working together to support the group.
So, apparently, do gardens. Some experiments showed that tomatoes beset with pathogens pass the news to their neighbors through fungal connections, thus warning them to crank up production of defensive enzymes; and beans, similarly, rally their troops via the mycorrhizal network to ward off pernicious aphids.
The mycorrhizal network is both ubiquitous and enormous. Every teaspoon of soil contains miles of fungal filaments, or hyphae. Soil microbiologists guess that the global total adds up to some 30 billion tons of fungi—or about four tons’ worth for every human being on the planet. It’s also largely invisible: generally we only notice it when fungal fruiting bodies (a.k.a. mushrooms) pop up in the yard, or if we actually set out to dig for it, as happens when searching for truffles.
About 95% of the world’s land plants are connected to the mycorrhizal network—and, according to the fossil record, it’s a beautiful friendship that has been going on for more than 400 million years.
Which may be the problem with people. Our species has only been around a scant 200,000 years or so—maybe we simply haven’t learned to appreciate our invisible interdependent connections yet. Maybe we need more time. Look at the mother trees. It’s clear that nurturing networks aren’t built in a day.
But I think we’ve got potential. I think that—just like trees—we’re better off together than alone, and that the web binding us together is greater than our differences. And even if in recent years that web has frayed a bit—well, I believe that it’s never too late to begin afresh. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2020, in GreenPrints Issue #121. Illustrations by Blanche Derby.
Living With the Wind
Too much wind? Very bad. No wind at all…? By Becky Rupp
Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees.
—J. Willard Marriott
Here where we live, on the Vermont side of northern Lake Champlain, we get a lot of wind. In the Summer, it whips the lake into whitecaps, rips the laundry off the line, and knocks the lawn furniture over. Wind is the reason for that dismal French Canadian sea shanty that ends, “You’ll never get drowned on Lake Champlain/As long as you stay on the shore.” Wind is the reason we put the vegetable garden on the sheltered side of the barn.
In the Winter, the wind comes straight down from the North Pole across the plains of Canada, makes a snow drift the size of a blue whale just off the back porch, freezes everything freezable solid, and buries the bird feeders.
Our wind is serious wind.
It could, of course, be a lot meaner wind. I just read that the strongest winds in the solar system are found on Neptune. There the wind whips frozen methane across the planet’s surface at speeds up to 1200 miles per hour, and temperatures hover around -392 degrees. Compared to Neptune, Vermont, even in February, is a beach on Tahiti.
And, for all my carping about frostbite, we can’t do without the wind.
There’s an Abenaki legend in which the hero Gluscabi, bent on duck-hunting, is fed up with the wind that keeps blowing his canoe backwards. Annoyed, he tracks down the great Wind Eagle—whose flapping wings generate the world’s winds—ties his wings to his sides, and stuffs him into a crack in the mountainside. With the Wind Eagle out of commission, there’s no more wind—but soon the air is hot and stuffy, the water is dirty and stagnant, and a chastened Gluscabi learns the error of his ways.
We need the wind, even though I’d like to keep it away from our tomato cages, some of which are funny-shaped due to large doses of it. And the wind may be even more important for trees.
Which brings me to Biosphere 2. Biosphere 2—a three-acre, glass-and-metal greenhouse that looks like something out of Star Trek—is located in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona. It was initiated as a science experiment in the 1990s, the brainchild of philanthropist Ed Bass and ecologist John Allen, and was in-tended to be an enclosed self-sustaining environmental system, a replica in miniature of the Earth (Biosphere 1). It was the kind of structure, Bass and Allen hoped, that would eventually allow people to live on Mars.
In its heyday, Biosphere 2 was home to eight Biospherians (four men, four women), 3,000 plant and animal species, and seven different mini-biomes, among them a tiny tropical rainforest with its own 25-foot waterfall, a grassy savannah, a marshland, a desert, and a 150-foot-long ocean, complete with coral reef. (The rainforest supplied the Biospherians with coffee beans; the ocean provided their table salt.)
The Biosphere 2 experiment lasted less than two years before the whole thing melted down. A number of factors contributed to its demise, prominent among these soil bacteria multiplying at breakneck rates and pumping way too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (The released Biospherians, gasping, said they’d never take oxygen for granted again.) Essential pollinating insect populations went extinct. Crops failed. And the trees started falling down.
Trees, it turns out, need wind.
When trees grow in the wild—that is, in the great outdoors of Biosphere 1—wind, the ultimate personal trainer, relentlessly keeps them moving. The continual mechanical push and shove—and occasional downright battering—by wind creates stress in the load-bearing structure of trees. That stress in turn causes a tree to dig in its heels and produce reaction wood, a stubbornly rigid, live-free-or-die-type wood that is particularly heavy in lignin. Lignin is an organic polymer—chemically a nightmarish snarl of ring-shaped molecules—that acts as a tree’s equivalent of cement. Reaction wood is how trees respond to aerodynamic bullying.
Reaction wood is a tree’s way of drawing a line in the sand. It’s obstinate and it’s tough. It’s what wind gets if it messes with trees.
The Biosphere 2 trees, deprived of wind, never developed reaction wood. They had no challenges, suffered no stress. Nothing shook them up. Biosphere 2, like an over-protective helicopter parent, never gave them the opportunity to test their mettle. The trees grew too tall, too fast, and had too little woody backbone. Gravity caught up with them and they toppled over.
I feel bad for those trees. Somebody should have intervened.
On the other hand, like Gluscabi’s disastrous goof with the Wind Eagle, there’s a lesson for us here, too.
Stress in the United States these days is at an all-time high. According to the latest Gallup poll, about 55% of American adults claim to experience stress for much of their day, as opposed to just 35% on average worldwide. We’re now as stressed as Greece, which has been topping the global stress charts since they lost the Olympics back in 2012.
Collectively we worry about money, health, family obligations, work performance, and (well, me) the speed at which our children drive. We agonize over all the things we’ve left undone. We worry—justifiably—about the future.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up.
Stress—dealt with in the right way—isn’t always bad.
Sometimes it gives us the impetus to do better. It motivates us to succeed. It inspires us to fight for what we think is right. It teaches us to deal with difficult situations. It gives us resilience and backbone.
Too much wind blows a tree over. But no wind does it no favors, either.
Same with us.
Stress isn’t all bad.
Sometimes it makes us tougher. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2019, in GreenPrints Issue #120. Illustrations by Russell Thornton.
The Secret Garden
Can an untended garden really survive? By Becky Rupp
Much though I love the book, as a scientist I’ve always been suspicious of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.
For those gardeners who haven’t read it, this is the story of ten-year-old Mary Lennox, possibly the world’s most disagreeable orphan. Mary, who lost her parents in a cholera epidemic in India, is shipped back to England to Misselthwaite Manor, a vast gloomy mansion on the Yorkshire moors, home to her uncle Archibald Craven who—somewhat understandably—wants nothing to do with her. Mary is every unpleasant British imperial stereotype rolled into one skinny, scowling bundle. She refuses to dress herself, spurns her porridge, and yells at the chatty but baffled (who wouldn’t want porridge?) maidservant, Martha, calling her the daughter of a pig.
The original title of the book was Mistress Mary, from the nursery rhyme “Mistress Mary, quite contrary/How does your garden grow?” Which suits her. Mary—no two ways about it—is an obnoxious brat.
Mary’s alter ego is Uncle Archibald’s son, her cosseted cousin Colin, a tantrum-prone invalid, whose mother died when he was born. Colin, also ten, is convinced that he’s turning into a hunchback, spends his days confined to bed, and screams whenever his will is crossed. Everyone is scared of him, including the housekeeper and the doctor. Mary is a mean little beast, but Colin is a mini-Caligula.
This unpromising pair is turned around by Martha’s odd but adorable younger brother Dickon, who has a talent with plants and animals—and by the discovery of the secret garden.
The garden once belonged to Colin’s mother, the late Mrs. Craven, and when Mary discovers it, she finds only a locked door in the wall, shrouded in ivy. A helpful robin, however, shows Mary the hidden key, and Mary slips inside to find a gorgeous, if some-what overgrown, rose garden. As the three children work together to bring the garden back to life, Mary and Colin heal themselves as well, and there’s (spoiler alert) a healthy, happy ending.
Though now a children’s classic, The Secret Garden, first published in 1911, began life as a dud. Burnett’s other children’s books, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886)—which led to a generation of little boys being named Cedric and stuffed into velvet suits with lace collars—and A Little Princess (1905), the story of young Sara Crewe, who remained brave and cheerful, even after being plunged into poverty—were far more popular, possibly because Cedric and Sara were much nicer children than Mary and Colin. In the end, however, The Secret Garden has come out ahead. In a recent poll of the all-time top 100 children’s novels, it ranked #8, beating out Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Winnie-the-Pooh.
I think it’s because of the garden.
That garden is everybody’s dream space. I’m willing to put up with any number of horrible orphans and entitled invalids to find out what’s on the other side of that hidden door.
The secret garden, it turns out, was real. Burnett, in 1898, facing awful publicity surrounding an impending divorce, fled to England where she rented a vast Misselthwaite-ish manor in Kent called Great Maytham Hall. She described it as a “charming place,” complete with library, billiard room, morning room, smoking room, drawing room, dining room, eighteen bedrooms, extensive stables, and a tower on the roof with a view of the English Channel. It also had a mysterious enclosed garden, with a wall so covered in ivy that no door could be found. Eventually—with the help of a perspicacious robin (really)—Burnett tracked down the door and, behind it, found the remains of an 18th-century garden. She planted it in roses.
A decade later inspiration ensued, and she wrote a book about it. But does The Secret Garden make sense? How long do gardens last?
The truth is, not very. Once their gardeners are gone, untended gardens go down fast.
The Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, spent the last years of her life planting one of the most famous rose gardens in the world at her home at Malmaison outside Paris. Even at the height of the Napoleonic wars, English gardeners were granted safe passage if they were bringing new plant specimens for Josephine’s garden, and the French Navy was ordered to confiscate any roses they might encounter on ships at sea. After the Empress’s death in 1814, however, the neglected garden—with its 250 varieties of roses—essentially disappeared.
I, a periodically shameful gardener, have seen the demise of gardens firsthand. You know what I mean. You’ve gone on vacation. You’ve been busy (writers—me—have deadlines). You’re painting the house. There’s a family reunion. Somebody’s getting married in someplace far from Vermont. Or having a baby (ditto). Or it’s really, really hot outside.
And in a matter of neglectful weeks, the garden is a mass of towering weeds, the sort that require machetes. Weeds that Tarzan could swing through, shouting for Cheetah.
I can’t help but wonder, as a cynical adult, how Burnett’s secret garden survived. She does her best to explain by adding the curmudgeonly estate gardener Ben Weatherstaff—who, she tells us, has been sneaking over the wall for years to do a bit of weeding and pruning. But this is a whole garden and Ben, due to rheumatism, admits that he hasn’t had a look-see in two years. The secret garden should have been a bramble-infested mess. Forget all those cute little rakes and spades the kids somehow managed to acquire. Mary, Colin, and Dickon should have had chain saws.
But as a lover of The Secret Garden, I’m willing to let common sense take a leap.
There’s more to gardens than the everyday, the gardens that give us tomatoes and onions and beets. There’s a magic and a romance to gardens, too, and a world of imagination. There’s more to gardens than biology. There’s wonder.
Because who doesn’t dream of someday finding a hidden door into their own secret garden?
And who doesn’t believe that there will be roses there? ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2019, in GreenPrints Issue #119. Illustrations by Blanche Derby.
Clouds
Good things, they are. Important, too. By Becky Rupp
Vermont is not a state noted for sun. In fact, sunshine-wise, we’re nearly the gloomiest state in the nation, second only to dank and lightless Washington, where apparently nobody in Seattle ever leaves home without an umbrella.
Tucson, Arizona, gets 193 sunny days each year; Albuquerque, New Mexico, gets 167; and San Diego, California, gets 146. Vermont gets a measly 58. No wonder New Englanders have a reputation for being dour.
Sun is an issue for gardeners, since so many plants need such a lot of it. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, beans, corn, and squash all do best in conditions of full sun, which is officially defined as at least six hours of direct sunlight per day. Even the leafy bits of carrots, radishes, and beets need at least a daily half-day of sun. Spinach, kale, and lettuce, my gardening manual says, are tolerant of shade, though even so they don’t thrive in caves or under the porch. We need that sunshine.
Some people, on the other hand, positively rave about clouds. The Cloud Appreciation Society—founded in 2005 by cloud aficionado Gavin Pretor-Pinney—is a band of 15,000 or so cloud-lovers worldwide, all dedicated to defending, describing, admiring, watching, and photographing clouds. The Society’s multi-point Cloud Manifesto points out that not only are all-blue skies blah and monotonous, but that clouds are important indicators of atmospheric moods and that contemplation of shapes in them profits the soul and therefore saves observers money that might otherwise be spent on exorbitant psychiatric bills.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson all wrote poems about clouds. So did A.A. Milne, for Winnie-the-Pooh, who was pretending to be one while dangling from a blue balloon. Descartes wrote a philosophical essay about clouds. John Constable painted them. Claude Debussy wrote a cloud nocturne, and Joni Mitchell and the Rolling Stones sang cloud songs.
And scientists take clouds very seriously.
Just for starts, clouds are complicated. There are at least ten different types of clouds, divided into genera and species, all with Latinate names—this last the brainchild of Luke Howard, a British pharmacist, who in 1803 wowed scientific circles with his “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds.” It was Howard who gave us such wordy cloud mouthfuls as cumulonimbus and stratocumulus lenticularis, all more precise definitions of what people had previously described as puffy and curly, or flat and depressing.
Clouds of various kinds, at any given moment, cover about two-thirds of our planet. The Earth, spied on from space, is a fat blue ball, liberally splattered with white—and it turns out that all those white swirls, curls, and blobs play an essential role in regulating the Earth’s climate. We know this because recent computer simulations have some ominous things to say about what happens when clouds go away.
Clouds, as all of us learned in elementary school via those ready-to-color diagrams of the water cycle, form when sun-warmed water evaporates from the Earth’s surface—to the tune of 285 cubic miles a day from the world’s oceans, a total of 300 trillion gallons heading upward every 24 hours. In the upper atmosphere this water vapor cools and condenses around particles of dust, salt, pollen, or other teeny stuff to form cloud droplets, of which there are over 100 million in every cubic yard of cloud. Planetary quirks of temperature, turbulence, wind, radiation, and geography all affect this process, which is why clouds and climate—even for a supercomputer—are tough nuts to crack.
The newest computer models, however, all show bad news for clouds. Clouds play a major role in cooling the Earth, intercepting incoming sunlight and reflecting it back into outer space. Perversely, however, as the Earth warms, clouds, like shrinking puddles, begin to disappear.
Physicists at the California Institute of Technology took a particular look at stratocumulus clouds—the low-lying, blankety kind that have by far the largest cooling effect on the planet. In their computer simulations, they found that when the carbon dioxide level in the air hit 1200 parts per million—a number that persistent fossil-fuel burning could well bring us to within the next century—the clouds disappeared altogether. The result? Relentlessly blue skies, an estimated 8oC (14oF) leap in planetary temperature, equatorial oceans as hot as hot tubs, and wholesale economic collapse.
It’s clear we need those clouds.
While this should concern all of us, there’s no need yet to throw down our hoes and trowels in despair. We’ve got a long way to go to the fatal 1200 ppm tipping point. (Carbon dioxide levels now are just over 410 ppm—up from 280 ppm in the days prior to the Industrial Revolution.) There’s a lot we can do before reaching the point of no return. There’s even a proposal—a suggested joint project between American and Chinese scientists—that, if push comes to shove, we might create artificial clouds by injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere, a process proponents refer to as solar geo-engineering.
I’ve got to say, though, that I don’t want fake geo-engineered clouds. I want to save the clouds we’ve got. And in view of all this, I find I’ve stopped whining about Vermont’s periodically unsparkly skies. I appreciate
clouds.
Because—yes—all our tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, beans, corn, and squash need sunshine.
But they also need rain. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2019, in GreenPrints Issue #118. Illustrations by Patricia Savage.
Dear Tree
Have you ever emailed … a tree? By Becky Rupp
A recent study, published in 2015 in the journal Nature, calculated that there are three trillion trees on planet Earth. That’s 3,000,000,000,000 trees—a number that’s impossible to wrap one’s mind around unless you’re an astrophysicist or a politician accustomed to dealing with the national deficit. That’s a lot of trees.
Most of those trees aren’t ours. The lion’s share of the world’s trees, it turns out, live in tropical or subtropical forests. The United States is home to just 228 billion trees, a piddling 8% of the planetary total, which as of 2015—do the math—averaged out to 716 trees per person. This isn’t a patch on Brazil (1,494 trees per person), Russia (4,461), or Canada (8,954), but it’s still a whole lot better than China (102 trees per person) or India (a mere 28).
It’s possible to feel pretty possessive and personal about 716 trees. Numerically, that’s manageable. Anybody could relate to that. That’s about the size of the average American high school. Just imagine all those teenagers as trees.
The personal tree (or trees) isn’t an outlandish idea—at least based on an ongoing experiment in Melbourne, Australia. In 2013, the Melbourne city officials assigned all their urban trees ID numbers and email addresses, in hopes that concerned citizens would use the contact info to tattle about tree-related problems such as dangerous branches, signs of disease, and leafy blockage of traffic views. Instead, tree-loving Melbournians by the thousands used the email addresses to correspond with their favorite trees.
“Dear Elm,” wrote a green-leaf elm admirer, “As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today, I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree.”
“Dear Algerian Oak,” wrote another, “thank you for giving us oxygen. Thank you for being so pretty. I don’t know where I’d be without you to extract my carbon dioxide…Stay strong, stand tall amongst the crowd.”
“Dearest Golden Elm,” said yet another. “It always makes me so happy to see you standing there minding your own business. I have to say, you have the most beautiful canopy and I love how the light green leaves on your branches contrast with the darkness of your trunk … stay awesome.”
Even displaced Aussies and flat-out foreigners chimed in.
“Dear Gum,” one homesick Melbournian wrote from Texas to a hometown eucalyptus tree, “ I wanted very much to tell you how much I miss your family.”
This is so cute, I thought.
But it’s more than that.
For those people, their tree wasn’t just any old oak, elm, or eucalyptus. It was a one-of-a-kind individual, with a history and a personality. Those Melbournians really knew their trees.
Just how individual are trees, anyway? In biology, that’s a matter of debate. According to Charles Darwin, scientists studying species classification fall into two opposing camps: the lumpers, who favor stuffing everything together into a limited number of broad categories; and the splitters, who prefer many fine divisions based on teeny individual differences. For taxonomists, this leads to a lot of nitpicky in-house bickering about the DNA profiles of beetles and jellyfish. In everyday life with trees, it’s simpler: lumpers are people who think all trees are pretty much alike and splitters think that each tree is a unique creation—like all those people who write fan letters to “Dear Elm.”
Lumping has a practical side: trees, as a group, for example, are clearly different from peonies or potatoes. But it’s also prone to pitfalls. Lumping is what happens when we assign blanket characteristics to certain ethnic or political groups (I was raised with “All French Canadians drive like bats out of hell”), and that does none of us any good. People don’t lump very well.
Splitting may be the tack to take with trees these days, as well, because our trees could use some personal appreciation and attention. Trees, worldwide, are in trouble.
About 12,000 years ago—before the dawn of agriculture—scientists estimate that Earth was home to twice as many trees as are around today. That means, since we first started gardening, we’ve done in three trillion trees—and today, at best guess, we continue to lose ten billion every year. This is bad news for the world’s land animals and plants, 80% of whom live in forests, and it’s even worse for climate as a whole. Trees put water back in our atmosphere. Over 90% of the water sucked up by a tree’s roots is sprayed into the sky via stomata—tiny openings on the surface of the leaves—in a process known as transpiration. In other words, a lot of the rain falling down on our spring gardens is due to three trillion trees, raining up. We need those trees.
I can’t help but think that we’d do better at conservation if we saw our trees the way the Melbournians do. No one would lightly dispose of a tree with which they’ve forged a relationship. After all, you don’t cut down a pal.
“Dear 1037148,” wrote one Australian tree-lover, “you deserve to be known by more than a number.”
Yes, Dear Tree, you do.
At the very least, you deserve a name and an address. And a lot of encouraging mail. ❖
By Becky Rupp, published originally in 2019, in GreenPrints Issue #117. Illustrations by John Hinderliter.
