Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

An Orchard Invisible

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

{1} An Orchard Invisible SEEDS...................................3{2} First Forms Minute EVOLUTION.................................7{3} Even Beans Do It SEX.........................................21{4} Before the Seed POLLINATION..................................39{5} According to Their Own Kinds INHERITANCE.....................51{6} O Rose, Thou Art Sick! ENEMIES...............................61{7} The Biggest Coconut I Ever See SIZE..........................70{8} Ten Thousand Acorns NUMBER...................................77{9} Luscious Clusters of the Vine FRUIT..........................87{10} Winged Seeds DISPERSAL.......................................101{11} Circumstance Unknown FATE....................................108{12} Fierce Energy GERMINATION....................................118{13} Sorrow's Mysteries POISONS...................................125{14} Ah, Sun-flower! OIL..........................................135{15} John Barleycorn BEER.........................................145{16} Realm of Illusion COFFEE.....................................155{17} Nourishment & Inspiration GASTRONOMY.........................165Scientific Names..................................................177Sources and Further Reading.......................................181Index.............................................................211

Chapter One

SEEDS

A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible. WELSH PROVERB

Seeds have a mirrored life, the original in nature and another reflected in literature and the imagination. The Welsh proverb simultaneously expresses both the biological potential of seeds and their metaphorical power. The American philosopher and early conservationist Henry David Thoreau, who was fascinated by seeds and inspired by them, wrote, "I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." Who cannot wonder that the largest organism on this planet, the giant redwood Sequoiadendron giganteum nicknamed "General Sherman," which weighs roughly the equivalent of a fleet of six Boeing 747-400 Jumbo Jets, germinated more than two thousand years ago from a seed weighing only a six-thousandth of a gram?

This book was once a seed or, to be precise, several. The paper in it is made from wood pulp from northern coniferous forests, grown and replanted from seed; the inks used on its pages and the varnish on its cover contain oils obtained from seeds; but the book grew from another kind of seed also-the seed of an idea. The idea was for a book that would explore the science behind all the familiar things that gardeners, cooks, and everyone else knows about seeds. This book is about why seeds have all the wonderful properties that they do, feeding us, flavoring our food, moistening and protecting our skin, and growing into plants that give us fruits, flowers, fiber, pharmaceuticals, poisons, perfume, protection, and pleasure. I hope to persuade you that reading about seeds is yet another way to enjoy them.

Expect wonders. Orchids have seeds as light as dust that are so ill-provisioned that seedlings spend their first few years as parasites on fungi. The biggest seed, by contrast, weighs twenty kilograms and belongs to the double coconut, a castaway palm whose ancestors were stranded on tiny islands in the Seychelles after these fragments of land were cast aside by India in its geological passage toward Asia. Evolution on a crumb from the Indian landmass produced Earth's largest seed.

The story of seeds, in a nutshell, is a tale of evolution bursting with questions. Its earliest episode concerns how and when the first seed plant evolved from its fern-like ancestors, with other episodes about why seeds have dormancy and what makes them germinate; why some seeds are rich in oil and others in starch; why some seeds are big and others small; why some are poisonous and others palatable. Though science has unraveled much about the whys and wherefores of seeds, there are still mysteries to be solved, including the most fundamental question of all: why do plants bother producing seeds in the first place? Why are plants, or animals for that matter, so hooked on sex?

You can follow the story cover-to-cover in a journey that will take you from a seed's first beginnings in sex and pollination through each step of its life till it ends in your coffee cup or on your plate; or you can dip into the story and sample a crumb of gardening, a grain of genetics, a dose of medicine, a packet of commerce, or a morsel of cooking: all in a seed. This is not a long book (who has time for those, these days?), but do not expect an express route from A to Z. Rather, I have followed a meandering path through the story of seeds and, like the root of a seedling, I have branched into particularly fertile territory wherever I have encountered it. So indulge me, and you will learn, as I did while writing, some fascinating if occasionally tangential connections between seeds and unexpected topics such as the witchcraft trials in seventeenth-century Salem (chapter 6, "O Rose, Thou Are Sick!"), Lyme Disease (chapter 8, "Ten Thousand Acorns"), human color vision (chapter 9, "Luscious Clusters of the Vine"), and the evolution of yeast (chapter 15, "John Barleycorn").

Whichever way you read the book, you will find a recurring theme: evolution constantly invents new uses for old devices. This happens because of how evolution works, creeping gradually and without direction from one solution to life's challenges to another. The achievements of the process of evolution are astonishing, and to some people unbelievable, but we didn't get here overnight. The two millennia it takes a seed to produce a tree the size of General Sherman is a mere fleeting instant in the 360-million-year history of seed plants. Laozi, a Chinese philosopher writing at about the time General Sherman was just a six-milligram seed, got it right when he reflected, "To see things in the seed, that is genius."

Chapter Two

EVOLUTION

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing. ERASMUS DARWIN, FROM The Temple of Nature

Charles Darwin's visionary grandfather Erasmus was ridiculed by his contemporaries for his evolutionary views. The family crest that he designed and blazoned on his carriage boldly declared "ex omnia conchis," or "everything from seashells." It may have been Erasmus's little joke, but he was decades ahead of his time and fundamentally right: life did first evolve in the sea. Where, though, did seed plants originate? There are indeed some seed plants that live in the sea, but the seagrasses (as they are known) live in shallow coastal waters and have terrestrial ancestors. Seagrasses are mere parvenus to a marine existence, still paddling in the muddy shallows where they can avoid the heavy-hitters among marine plants-the algae.

Even though seed plants first evolved on land, that does not mean that we can ignore the marine...