The Big, Bad Book of Botany The World's Most Fascinating Flora

363 Pages·2014·8.97 MB·English

by  Michael Largo

DEDICATION
To Joe Largo.
Thank you for your help and for being a son who makes a father proud.
EPIGRAPH
What is a weed?
A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X Y Z
Acknowledgments
Sources
About the Author
Also by Michael Largo
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Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
What is green and allows you to breathe? That life-sustaining lungful of air you
just took had to come from somewhere. Without plants, and the oxygen they
produce, there could be no animal life on earth. These were our planet’s
pioneering organisms, who first learned the tricks of adaptation to survive on our
once-sterile rock, and who turned it into the vibrant, blue-green home we know
today. They are both our forerunners and our contemporaries in life—but what
do we really know about plants?
No one has cracked the encrypted language of plants. Insects chirp, bees buzz,
animals growl, hiss, hum, and even transmit low-frequency sound waves. But
plants, as far as we know, never say a thing. Fields of tall summer grasses waft
without agency, moving whichever way the wind blows. Roots stay where their
seeds originally sprouted. A rose makes no announcement when its bud opens in
full-petal bloom. Pine trees in a forest stand like silent sentries. A bent coconut
palm owes its haphazard arc to the ocean winds and sea mist; it is silent on the
changes its species needed to learn in order to survive where it does. There are
trees living today that are estimated to be eight thousand years old, and nearly
microscopic phytoplankton that live and die within an hour—but neither will
divulge their history or the secrets they contain unless we look. Without plants,
we would simply not be here.
Plants have no brains. We can be certain they have absolutely no way to
perceive this world in any way remotely similar to our view. But is there another
level of “consciousness” we have yet to understand? Plants do everything
possible to survive and to reproduce toward the continuation of their species.
This is no easy feat, particularly as disadvantaged as plants are to alter the
environment in which they find themselves. The seemingly magical
biochemistry these entirely stationary organisms acquired to survive and thrive is
astonishing. Much has come from looking at the chemistry within; for example,
we now understand how a plant produces oxygen via photosynthesis—an
amazing process we would never be able to duplicate—and there are countless
other techniques plants employ that even the smartest computer could not match.
The primary goal of every living organism is individual survival and the
preservation of its species. As more complex plants arose, new ways to procreate
came into play. Plants had to find a way to attract “helpers” to transfer male
pollen to a female ovary in order to make a “baby”—what botanically we call
fruits, or seeds. The collection of means they devised to accomplish this all-
important process was and still is diverse. What we admire as a flower is
basically a billboard, grown with the sole purpose of saying “Hey, check me
out” to bees, beetles, or birds. Some enticed with sweet nectar, others chose
toxins and traps, yet all methods proved to be marvelously diverse and
interesting.
Most of what our earliest ancestors knew of plants has been forgotten. The
first attempt to catalog plants is found in sacred Indian texts from 1100 B.C.,
known as the Avestan Writings. Aristotle’s student Theophrastus compiled a
book, Historia Plantarum, sometime during the second and third century B.C.
that included information on 500 different species. The most important book
about plants was written by first-century A.D. Greek physician Pedanius
Dioscorides, titled (when later translated into Latin) De Materia Medica, which
remained the standard and most extensive book about plants for nearly sixteen
centuries. These books treated botany more like herbalism, and were meant to
reveal the best plants for medical purposes. There was no science, no medicine,
no pharmacology for early peoples; the kinds of things we depend on from
science were found in plants, and survival depended upon knowing the
properties and secrets each species held.
In this book, I try to combine the reference-like quality of these early texts and
the most fascinating folklore of the past, with descriptions, life cycles, advice on
cultivation, and the benefits these plants provide. But more important, I hope to
capture the incredible diversity of plants and marvel at the vast plant kingdom’s
many wonders. We need to look at the amazing greenness about us in a new way
—with not only awe and respect, but also renewed curiosity. Likewise, we must
protect the incredible flora we are fortunate to still have among us, lest our own
actions cause them to disappear forever.