Headnote

I came to appreciate butterfly weed through my wife Meghan’s occasional summer harvests. Its clustered orange blooms can look like small flames or fireworks hovering above a meadow- or table-scape; or, if an especially long and narrow cluster is laying at rest on a table, it reminds me of a beaded brooch or hair clip.1 But I didn’t know the wonder or the strangeness behind the plant’s namesake until more recently.

Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), known historically as pleurisy root, is a member of the perennial, herbaceous, flowering milkweed genus and is native to eastern and central North America. Unlike other milkweeds, which produce a milky latex that they release when damaged, butterfly weed runs a clear or greenish sap. But both substances are actually a powerful defense mechanism containing cardiac glycosides, which literally disrupt heartbeats; specifically, they inhibit the cellular sodium-potassium pump that regulates the muscle’s contractions. The poison is a family affair—milkweeds are part of the dogbane (Apocynaceae) family, some members of which were traditionally used to make the ends of darts and arrows deadly toxic. Nonetheless, milkweed sap also was used traditionally to clear warts and other skin conditions, and the plant’s roots were chewed for digestive or respiratory issues. Extracts of the root were included in the official U.S. Pharmacopeia for nearly a century, until the early twentieth century.

The monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is not immune to this heart poison. Through a delicate balance cultivated over eons and regions, the famously beautiful insect has learned to handle and make use of it. In fact, milkweed is the only cradle a monarch will accept. The female searches out its particular bitterness, often preferring milkier and more poisonous species over the showy butterfly weed, and lays her eggs on the underside of a leaf. When the eggs hatch, the caterpillars use special trenching and cutting techniques to divert the sap from the leaves, seeking to avoid not the sap’s poison but its stickiness, which can glue their mouths shut or adhere their bodies to the plant. Once the caterpillars grow larger and stronger, they actually make pools of the sap on the leaves and ingest it in large quantities, pirating the poison to make a defense mechanism of their own. The poison accumulated in their bodies renders the adult butterflies bitter and undesirable to potential predators, and it also inhibits the deadly parasite that plagues monarch butterflies. In fact, a butterfly infected with the parasite can seek out an especially toxic plant to be its nursery.

The butterfly’s dependence on this poison drives its epic, multi-generational annual migration. Beginning in the coniferous forests of central Mexico, the initial “super generation” of monarchs travels north, timing its arrival in the southern U.S. with the first emergence of the milkweeds in this region. This generation lays its eggs and then dies, producing a new generation with a shorter lifespan that will move further north in pursuit of newly growing milkweeds. This cycle repeats several more times, each curtailed generation finding a fresh crop of poisonous plants, until the final generation reaches the north in autumn. The cooling temperatures and declining plant life trigger another “super generation” of monarchs, which pause their fertility to make the treacherous 3,000-mile journey back to Mexico, where they will begin their quest for poison once again.

Fig. 2. Monarch and Milkweed, by Helen Frost and Leonid Gore. Read Aloud by Reading Rhino (July 30, 2026).

Readings

1. As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
   the taste of dill, or tarragon—
   he could barely tell one from the other—
   
   filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother.
   Why should he be stricken
   with grief, not for his mother and father,
   
   but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter
   in Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon—
   he could barely tell one from the other—
   
   and why should he now savour
   the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin,
   as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?
   
   *

   He looked about. He remembered her palaver
   on how both earth and sky would darken—
   ‘You could barely tell one from the other’—
   
   while the Monarch butterflies passed over
   in their milkweed-hunger: ‘A wing-beat, some reckon,
   may trigger off the mother and father
   
   of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher
   with the force of a hurricane.’
   Then: ‘Milkweed and Monarch “invented” each other.’
   

   *
   
   He looked about. Cow’s-parsley in a samovar.
   He’d mistaken his mother’s name, ‘Regan’, for ‘Anger’:
   as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
   he could barely tell one from the other.

Paul Muldoon. “Milkweed and Monarch.” The Annals of Chile. London: Faber & Faber, 1994. 10-11.

2. Hirsute-pubescent; stems stout, simple, or branched near the summit, ascending or erect, very leafy, 1°-2° high, the milky sap scanty. Leaves alternate, lanceolate or oblong, acute or sometimes obtuse at the apex, narrowed, rounded or cordate at the base, sessile or short-petioled, 2’- 6’ long, 2”-12” wide; umbels cymose, terminal, many-flowered; peduncles shorter than the leaves; pedicels 1/2’-1’ long; corolla-segments about 3” long, greenish orange; corona-column about 1\2” long; hoods erect, oblong, bright orange, or yellow, 2-3 times as long as the stamens, longer than the filiform horns; fruiting pedicels decurved; follicles nearly erect, finely pubescent, 4’-5’ long.

   In dry fields, Maine and Ontario to Minnesota, Florida, Texas, Chihuahua and Arizona. Consists of numerous races, differing in shape and size of the leaves and color of the flowers. June-Sept. Wind-or orange-root. Canada-, flux-, tuber- or white-root. Orange swallow-wort. Yellow milkweed. Indian-posy.

“Asclepias tuberosa L. Butterfly-weed or -flower. Pleurisy-root. Fig. 3383.” From Nathaniel Lord Britton and Addison Brown. An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions, Vol. III: Gentianaceae to Compositae (Gentian to Thistle). 1898. Second Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. 25.

Supplementum

• Craig Holdrege. “The Story of an Organism: Common Milkweed.” The Nature Institute (2010).

• Helen Frost and Leonid Gore. Monarch and Milkweed. New York City, New York: Atheneum, 2006.

• Anurag Agrawal. Monarchs and Milkweed: A Migrating Butterfly, A Poisonous Plant, and Their Remarkable Story of Coevolution. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017.

• Sandy Masuo, “Got Milkweed?,” The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (October 18, 2022).

• Robert Frost, “Pod of the Milkweed.” 1954. Genius.com

✦ From the Earthly Book of Hours ✦

Not a lot new here this week, but I did find a lovely quote about boredom from Walter Benjamin (see below).

Headnote

Rounding out my quartet of summer berries (fraudulent, actual, or imaginatively so), we arrive now at the blueberry—my apologies to the sweet strawberry, that rosaceous receptacle, which will have to wait for another summer.

Apart from a handful of medieval and early modern instances, most human food crops were domesticated thousands of years ago, during the globally distributed neolithic, or so-called first agricultural, revolution. However, blueberries stand alongside kiwifruits, Hass avocados, macadamia nuts, and wild rice (manoomin) as important crops that only began to be cultivated scientifically and commercially in the twentieth century—although, as is often the case, evidence of indigenous harvesting, management, and multifarious use extends back thousands of years.

The blueberry’s modern, agronomic story goes something like this: in 1911, botanist Frederick Coville teamed up with cranberry farmer Elizabeth White (heir to the Whitesbog company town infamously documented by Lewis Hine). They found that blueberries require acidic, peat-and-sand soil—à la North America’s prehistoric blueberry “barrens”—rather than neutral, rich soil, to thrive. They also ran a contest encouraging locals near White’s home in New Jersey to submit the largest wild blueberries they could forage, and then crossbred these selections to produce larger, sweeter, and more uniform berries. While the collaboration went on to develop hundreds of these hybrid varieties, it was in fact an especially fantastic wild specimen, submitted during the initial contest, that became the first commercial crop harvested in 1916. New cultivars (including more warm-tolerant ones), mechanization, and national expansion followed over the rest of the century. Then, sometime in the 1990s, several studies identifying blueberries’ high antioxidant and anthocyanin levels launched this newly minted “superfood” into a global, year-round, rapidly expanding, multi-billion-dollar industry expected to produce 3.2 million metric tons of berries by 2028. Though globalization, as usual, can have devastating local consequences.

The recentness of this history makes the process of domestication much more visible than for other cultured plants. It reveals how closely implicated modern agriculture can be in the developmental interests of the state. Indeed, Coville’s employer was the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and his Experiments in Blueberry Culture, the foundational research document in the history of blueberry domestication, was produced by the Bureau of Plant Industry (RIP in 1953) and distributed by the “government printing office.” A more critical and intimate story of the blueberry, as Alix Beeston notes below, might touch on the morals it is chosen to convey in children’s literature and on how the indulgent succulence of a certified-organic commodity comes to embody both the insulating protections of capital and the various guilts that society displaces onto (young) women’s appetites. A more reparative story of blueberries might be found in the abundance experienced by Wabanaki caretakers through their recovery of ritual, tradition, kinship, and self-determination in the blueberry barrens of eastern Maine—or in celebratory poems by Robert Frost, Mary Szybist, Mary Oliver, or James Lasdun.

Proper blueberries belong to the Cyanococcus section (Greek kyanos, “dark blue” + kokkos, “berry”) of the genus Vaccinium, which also includes cranberries, bilberries, lingonberries, some (but not all) huckleberries, and the less-known because not-tasty-to-humans farkleberry/sparkleberry. The majority of commercial blueberry cultivation involves cultivars of the primary “highbush” species (Vaccinium corymbosum), although a non-trivial proportion of the market consists of several “wild” lowbush species (e.g., Vaccinium angustifolium). These wild varieties emerged in the northeastern corner of the continent some 10,000 years ago, when glaciers receded and left behind fields of thin, acidic topsoil. You can visit them today and look out over ancient tangles of stems, roots, and berries, spreading and multiplying via underground clones. And yet each barren contains a multitude of subtle variations in color, taste, shape, and genetic makeup. Makes you wonder what we mean when we call something “barren.”

Readings

1. Whitesbog Blueberries are a real money-maker for the commercial grower.

   Note that the photographed branch of these remarkable berries is reproduced here actual size. No picture, however, can convey any idea of the delicious flavor, which while keeping the delightful tang of wild blueberries, is sweeter and smoother. Whitesbog Blueberries are practically seedless; they are firm and keep well. They are exceptionally heavy yielders, with all the requirements for a marketable and highly profitable fruit, commanding highest prices wherever sold.

   Read inside the whole story of this remarkable berry. Learn how carefully the different varieties are propagated in the Whitesbog Nurseries. How the commercial plantations which are now in bearing are realizing a yearly return of more than $1000 an acre. How land now unprofitable for any other crop may be well adapted to blueberry cultivation.

   

Joseph J. White, Inc. Whitesbog Blueberries (1925). U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agriculture Library.

2. Eat one blueberry and you’ll eat them all. In Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal, an award-winning illustrated children’s book published in 1948, plucky Sal sets out with her mother to pick fruit on Blueberry Hill. ‘We will take our berries home and can them,’ her mother says. ‘Then we will have food for the winter.’ Sal can’t help herself. The blueberries barely hit the bottom of her tin pail – ‘kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk!’ – before they’re scooped into her mouth, a cheeky smile on her lips.

   In Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Willy Wonka forbids Miss Violet Beauregarde from chewing his magic gum, a new and untested invention. But she, a self-proclaimed chewing-gum champion, grabs a stick and shoves it into her mouth. The gum contains a three-course dinner, with blueberry pie for dessert, and it’s in this final course that things go wrong. From nose to cheeks, hands to arms and legs, a ‘brilliant, purplish-blue, the colour of blueberry juice’ spreads like a dye over Violet’s skin and hair. ‘Violet, you’re turning violet, Violet!’ shrieks her mother, as her daughter becomes ‘an enormous round blue ball – a gigantic blueberry, in fact – and all that remained of Violet Beauregarde herself was a tiny pair of legs and a tiny pair of arms sticking out of the great round fruit and little head on top’. In the 1971 film adaptation, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Violet’s red belt makes a satisfying pop as it gives under the pressure of her expanding stomach. Ballooning with berry juice, consumed by that which she consumes, she’s rolled off by the Oompa Loompas as they sing their smug, moralising song: ‘It’s repulsive, revolting, and wrong, chewing all day long – the way that a cow does!’

   Violet, that rude little cow! So disdainful, in her marathon mastication, of the manners and prohibitions of adults, with the perfectly devastating contempt of an almost-teenaged girl. And so unseemly in her bald-faced competitiveness, her elbow-jostling self-interest.

   By design – Dahl’s design, his un-prim but still reactionary morality tale – the prideful and indecorous Violet is far less likeable than the cheerful Sal. Yet both of these girls are rebellious blueberry-eaters. They refuse to defer to the adults or to delay the gratification of their desires. Blueberries, in these stories, are associated with young women’s illicit acts of consumption, illicit in both timing and excess. The girls eat when they shouldn’t and they eat too much. Once they start, in different ways, they can’t stop.

Alix Beeston. “Fingers Stained With Juice and Ink.” Rev. of Ellena Savage, Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding (2020). The Sydney Review of Books (June 15, 2020).

Supplementum

• Frederick V. Coville. Experiments in Blueberry Culture. Bureau of Plant Industry, Bulletin No. 193. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911.

• Jessamine Starr. “Cultivated or Wild, the Blueberry Has a Story to Tell.” Fruit Love Letters (January 25, 2022).

• Amanda Peters. The Berry Pickers: A Novel. Brooklyn, New York: Catapult, 2024.

• Kim E. Hummer. “Manna in Winter: Indigenous Americans, Huckleberries, and Blueberries.” HortScience 48.4 (April 2013): 413–417.

• Julia Blakely. “Native Fruit: The Wild Blueberry.” Unbound: Smithsonian Libraries and Archives (November 13, 2018).

• J. Kim Kaplan. “Blueberry Growing Comes to the National Agricultural Library.” Agricultural Research (May/June 2011): 14-16.

Fig. 3. Voices from the Barrens: Native Peoples, Blueberries, and Sovereignty (2020, dir. Nancy Ghertner).

✦ From the Earthly Book of Hours ✦

• A taste of food writing from M.F.K. Fisher and Gertrude Stein in the Convivium block, alongside Jun’ichirō Tanizaki on the mystery of shadows

• A batch of morning, commuting, and noontime poetry from Michael Field, Sarojini Naidu, and C.P. Cavafy, respectively.

  

Headnote

In my personal opinion, much resisted by the chatbots I consulted, corn is the berries of the vegetable world. Indeed, corn—specifically, sweet corn—is unique among commonly eaten plants in that it spans the typically distinct categories of fruit, vegetable, and grain. In other words, it’s a grass that produces sweet clusters that you eat like a carrot. The chatbots don’t know everything yet.

Unlike the relatively simple histories of serviceberries and redcurrants, the story of corn may be one of the more beautiful and harrowing tales you haven’t heard. Indeed, even the long series of events through which archaeologists, geneticists, and other researchers reconstructed this tangled story is itself fascinating. Originating in Mexico some 9,000 years ago and eventually reaching fields, laboratories, and kitchens around the world, corn has powered civilizations and modernization while also, due to a mix of ignorance and greed, occasionally plaguing human health.

You may have noticed that corn does not exist in the wild; you can’t pluck an ear from your nearby nature trail. That absence generated nearly a century of academic controversy, as researchers scoured ancient caves and thousands of genetic sequences to determine whence this now-ubiquitous plant came. They eventually determined that modern maize originated from a subspecies of an unassuming, bushy grass called teosinte that grew in the Balsas River Valley of southern Mexico. Through generations upon generations, indigenous growers and seed keepers up and down the Americas tended and selected plants to create much of the abundance and variety we know today. Through these changes, the plant came to depend on humans, to the extent that it cannot exist without human attention and interaction: for although corn can be fertilized by the wind, its densely packed and sheathed cobs will fall to the ground and decay if our hands (or machines) do not husk and separate the kernels.

The relationship is symbiotic. The expertise of corn’s indigenous stewards was proved in the decades following European contact with the Americas, as the crop spread rapidly around the world. Its productivity, adaptability, and caloric richness made it popular across southern Europe, western and central Africa, and eastern Asia. Many peasant cultures across these regions embraced corn as a daily staple or life-saving supplement. The stuff could grow at elevations low or high, in conditions hot or wet, and in growing seasons short or long—thank you, C4 photosynthesis!

However, indigenous knowledge about how to prepare corn did not spread with the plant itself. Although corn is rich in niacin and tryptophan, these vital nutrients only become digestible for humans if the corn is treated with an alkaline solution, such as wood ash or limestone water. This process of nixtamalization was not included in the so-called Columbian Exchange, leading to widespread nutrient deficiencies and countless deaths, as the four Ds of pellagra—diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death—ravaged southern Europe, the U.S. South, and regions of Asia and Africa over several centuries. The health risks continued even after corn’s relationship to niacin deficiency was understood and remedied. Though long stigmatized as a poor, rural, or fodder crop, corn eventually saturated the modern diet through indirect channels, including grain-fed meat and eggs, a multitude of processed foods, and various sweeteners. By some estimates, up to 70% of processed foods in a modern grocery store contain some form of corn product; likewise, as depicted in the 2007 documentary King Corn, hair tests reveal that up to 70% of the carbon in a modern American body can come from corn. The effects of this new-and-improved, supermarket version of a monotrophic diet may not be as gruesome as pellagra, but they are just as pernicious.

There’s much more that one could say about corn: about what is universal and what is distinctive in its mythological origins; about how it inspired winsome poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg; about the beverages and biofuels made out of it; about its place in the broader Andropogoneae, or sorghum, tribe; or about how it typically has an even number of rows and its kernels embody a variety of mathematical and statistical principles.

Even within the typically tedious realms of taxonomy and genetics, maize (Zea mays) is a wild, wild bunch. Its many subspecies or cultivars include the four most widely cultivated varieties: dent or field corn (var. indentata), flint corn (var. indurata), sweet corn (var. saccharata), and popcorn (var. everta). But many other varieties exist. The visually stunning glass gem corn, which went viral in the early 2010s, was produced—or perhaps recovered—in the 1980s, when an Oklahoma plant breeder crossed heirloom varieties of flint, flour, and popcorn. One rare variety, known as pod corn, has a husk on each individual kernel (rather than the overall cob), which makes it interesting for scientists to study but not very practical for eating. Each subspecies has distinctive qualities and applications, based on the amount of starch it contains and the texture or composition of its kernel. For example, the ever-popular sweet corn is the result of one or more genetic mutations that stop the plant’s sugars from converting into starch.

Need I continue? Or have you accepted the premise that corn is one wonderful berry?

Readings

1. “The twin brothers were nurtured and raised by their Grandmother; the eldest was named Teharonghyawago, or the Holder of Heaven; the youngest was called Tawiskaron, or Flinty rock, from his body being entirely covered with such a substance. They grew up, and with their bows and arrows, amused themselves throughout the island, which encreased in extent, and they were favoured with various animals of Chace. Tawiskaron was the most fortunate hunter, and enjoyed the favour of his Grandmother. Teharonghyawago was not so successful in the Chace, and suffered from their unkindness. When he was a youth, and roaming alone, in melancholy mood, through the island, a human figure, of noble aspect, appearing to him, addressed him thus ‘My son, I have seen your distress, and heard your solitary lamentations; you are unhappy in the loss of a mother, in the unkindness of your Grandmother and brother. I now come to comfort you, I am your father, and will be you Protector; therefore take courage, and suffer not your spirit to sink. Take this (giving him an ear of maize) plant it, and attend it in the manner, I shall direct; it will yield you a certain support, independent of the Chace, at the same time that it will render more palatable the viands, which you may thereby obtain. I am the Great Turtle which supports the earth, on which you move. Your brother’s ill treatment will increase with his years; bear it with patience till the time appointed, before which you shall hear further.’
   
   “After saying this, and directing him how to plant the corn, he disappeared. Teharonghyawago planted the corn, and returned home. When its verdant sprouts began to flourish above the ground, he spent his time in clearing from all growth of grass and weeds, which might smother it or retard its advancement while yet in its tender state, before it had acquired sufficient grandeur to shade the ground.”

Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Creation Myth, 1816. From Carl F. Klinck and James J. Talman, Eds. The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970. 88-91.

2. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

   So goes he forth beneath the planter’s moon
       With sack of seed that pledges large increase, 
   His simple pagan faith knows night and noon, 
       Heat, cold, seedtime and harvest shall not cease.

   Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

   And yielding to his needs, this honest sod, 
       Brown as the hand that tills it, moist with rain, 
   Teeming with ripe fulfillment, true as God, 
       With fostering richness, mothers every grain.

Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). “The Indian Corn Planter.” Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). 1912. Toronton, Ontario: The Musson Book Company Limited, 1917. 137.

Supplementum

• Robin Wall Kimmerer. “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System.” Emergence Magazine (October 31, 2018).

• Kimi Eisele. “Artists del Maíz and Maguey.” Border Lore: Heritage and Culture of the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico (October 2, 2023).

• James Doyle. “Giving Thanks before the Pilgrims: The Art of Feasting in the Ancient Americas.” Perspectives: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (November 25, 2015).

• Brian Krueger. “The weird color patterns of corn kernels led to a major genetic discovery in 1950.” Omic.ly (January 20, 2025).

• “Ancient DNA Continues to Rewrite Corn’s 9,000-Year Society-Shaping History.” Smithsonian (December 14, 2020).

✦ From the Earthly Book of Hours ✦

• New readings this week from two figures whose abbreviated lives bear some striking similarities: Simone Weil (1909-1943) at midday, and Novalis (1772-1801) in the wee morning.

• An early color wheel by Moses Harris (1730-1787).

• Since the images and readings for each hour alternate randomly, I’m trying to make a little keepsake feature to save/print/share a pairing of picture and text; but the results so far leave something to be desired.

Headnote

After a week off to make some progress on my book of hours project, we continue our regularly scheduled berry programming with another red one adored by my oldest son.

Unlike the misleading serviceberry, which is in fact a pome, the red currant or (if you’re British) redcurrant is a true berry. Indeed, all true currants, whether red, black, white, or pink—and no matter which of the more than 60 varieties extant globally—are berries. However, the dried, raisin-like “Zante currants” commonly available in stores are not really currants at all but a type of grape made into raisins since antiquity. The currant genus (Ribes) includes many species that are red, and some of these are native to North America. Yet most commercially available red currants in the U.S. comprise a mix of three varieties that are native to Europe, in part because currant plants were mostly banned in this country for more than a century (see below). Confused yet?

Thankfully, Ribes rubrum, as the most common edible species of red currant is called in Latin (and would be named in Dr. Seuss books), is a simple plant. To propagate it, you need only chop a few branches and stick them into dirt or water. They lack complex or extensive roots and have botanically simple leaves (one piece per stem, versus a compound leaf with leaflets). Currants also have associations with the simplicity of peasant culture; although they were foraged in the wild for thousands of years, currants were not really cultivated intentionally until around 1600 (perhaps earlier in Russia).1

Yet the brilliance of their jewel-like strigs and racemes also make them suitable accoutrements for aristocrats. They are perhaps best known in jelly or jam form, including the English sweet-and-sour condiment known as Cumberland Sauce (the origins of this name are much debated), which is similar to—but supposedly not inspired by—the cranberry sauce of North American provenance. An especially sophisticated preparation is to individually select the currants and manually remove their many tiny seeds using a sharpened feather quill, which leaves the orb intact within a thin sugar jelly. But you are much more likely to encounter a strained or filtered jam. In fact, many home cooks leave not only the seeds but also the stems intact during processing, because they add both natural pectin (a thickening agent) and a slightly astringent quality to the finished product. Red currants are also popular as a juice, often in combination with other fruits, and may serve as a digestive aid.

As noted above, currant plants were banned from the U.S. in 1911 to protect pine trees and, therefore, the timber industry; currants are the primary alternate (non-pine) host for a forest-devastating fungus, white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola). They are still heavily restricted in many regions today. For example, it is illegal to grow black currants anywhere in Massachusetts, and a permit is required to cultivate other currants (at least notionally; enforcement seems limited, at least in the gardens I frequent).

Readings

1. Description: This plant is equally at home in hedges and ditches, trained against the wall of a house, or as a shrub cultivated in gardens. It has straggling stems, three to five lobed leaves, yellowish-green flowers, and fruit in pendulous racemes. The smooth berries are always red in the wild state, but cultivation has added the white and champagne or flesh-coloured varieties. The White and Red Dutch Currants are regarded as the best. The English name was given because the berries were like the Corinth or Zante Grape, the currant of the shops. There are between thirty and forty kinds of currant recognized in catalogues. The fruit is a favourite for tarts and jellies, and being a very hardy plant, is within the reach of all. The juice is a pleasant acid in punch, and was a favourite ingredient in the coffee-houses of Paris, where the sweetened juice is still preferred as a beverage, to syrup of almonds.

   
   Constituents: The juice is said to contain citric acid, malic acid, sugar, vegetable jelly and jam.

   
   Medicinal Action and Uses: Refrigerant, aperient, antiscorbutic. The juice forms a refreshing drink in fever, and the jelly, made from equal weights of fruit and sugar, when eaten with ‘high’ meats, acts as an anti-putrescent. The wine made from white ‘red’ currants has been used for calculous affections.
   

   In some cases the fruit causes flatulence and indigestion. It has frequently given much help in forms of visceral obstruction. The jelly is antiseptic, and will ease the pain of a burn and prevent the formation of blisters, if applied immediately. Some regard the leaves as having emmenagogue properties.

Mrs. M. Grieve. “Currant, Red.” A Modern Herbal. London, England: Jonathan Cape, 1931. n.p.

2. The paramount use of the currant is in making jelly, for which purpose it is unsurpassed. The red varieties are preferred owing to their higher color, but it is said that if white currants are scalded before pressing, they make a rich, red jelly, not as dark as that from red varieties, but very handsome. The fruit, either green or ripe, makes excellent pies or sauce. It is especially satisfactory when used in combination with fruits which lack sprightliness or acidity. With a few currants added, even the Russian mulberry becomes a most appetizing fruit, and the juneberry seems to be all that one could wish. The currant supplies the requisite acidity, and these fruits furnish the richness of flavor which the currant lacks. In canning it preserves its qualities intact, so that it is nearly as available in winter as in summer. Currant shrub is a pleasant summer drink, made from the ripe fruit crushed and compounded like lemonade. The juice is said to be very useful in soothing fevers. At one time the fruit was reported as having a steady demand in St. Louis for use as a flavoring in soda water.

Fred W. Card. Bush-Fruits: A Horticultural Monograph of Raspberries, Blackberries, Dewberries, Currants, Gooseberries, and Other Shrublike Fruits. New York, New York: Macmillan, 1903 (1898). p. 351.

Supplementum

• “Cumberland Sauce.” Cook’s Info (Oct. 4, 2020).

• Molly Watson. “What Are Currants? A Guide to Buying and Cooking With Currants.” The Spruce Eats (March 18, 2024).

• Jonathan Townsend. “18th-Century Currants.” Townsends (July 7, 2014).

• George Bunyan. "Red Currants.” Helpful Hints for Hard Times: Gooseberries and Currants for Market. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1895.

• M. L. Fernald. “Ribes vulgare and its Indigenous Representatives in Eastern North America.” Rhodora: Journal of the Botanical Society of New England 9.97 (January 1907): 1-4.

✦ From the Earthly Book of Hours ✦

• Lord knows that you don’t need another app or feed in your life, but it is possible to save the Earthly Book of Hours website to your phone’s home screen for easier access. Just navigate to the main page (“The Current Hour”), look for the Share button, and select “Add to Home Screen.”

• New this week in the Doldrums (3pm-6pm): readings from William James (1842-1910) and Robert Burton (1577-1640); an early depiction of neurons from Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934).

Headnote

It’s not every day you get to experience a new taste, a new texture—a new food—at the same time as your child, while both perched atop a long-tail cargo bicycle behind their elementary school.

We rolled up unexpecting. My son asked if they were edible, and, after I quickly confirmed on the internet that they were in fact serviceberries, we both sampled and quickly set in to munching. We rolled off a few minutes later to meet the rest of the family, sweetened and sated.

A berry in the apple family? A blueberry crossed with a cherry? “Ephemeral sips of summer,” as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in the first reading below.

The genus Amelanchier includes more than 20 species of shrubs and small trees (or more than 80, by some counts). These go by many names regionally and linguistically: serviceberry, sugarplum, sarvis, shadbush, juneberry, saskatoon, chuckley pear, and misâskwatômin (in Cree). This abundance and variety are compounded by the genus’ penchant for cross-pollination; for the many species of Amelanchier easily hybridize with one another, creating “swarms” in which the difference between original and hybrid are blurred. They even can cross with another genus entirely, as when the Western or Saskatoon serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia) intermingles with a certain species of mountain-ash. And because serviceberry blossoms do not require fertilization to produce viable seeds (due to what the botanists call apomixis), these hybrids do not suffer the fate of the sterile mules; indeed, any stray cross-pollinated plant can produce a whole stand of hybrids identical to its novel self. Long botanics treatises have been written trying to make sense of the ensuing chaos, as K.M. Wiegand attests below.

Serviceberries are in the “apple subtribe” of the Rose family, along with pears, quince, aronia berries, and several other edible fruits. Because of this, the serviceberry is a pome fruit rather than a true berry, each containing several small seeds. Although these add some texture to each bite, they also impart a slight almond flavor, which is further enhanced by cooking or heating (for example, in pies and compotes). Maybe next year we will have to try our first serviceberry pie.

Readings

1. Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvice, Serviceberry—these are among the many names for Amelanchier. Ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance. The tree is beloved for its fruits, for medicinal use, and for the early froth of flowers that whiten woodland edges at the first hint of spring. Serviceberry is known as a calendar plant, so faithful is it to seasonal weather patterns. Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed. In this folklore, this was the time that mountain roads became passable for circuit preachers, who arrived to conduct church services. It is also a reliable indicator to fisherfolk that the shad are running upstream—or at least it was back in the day when rivers were clear and free enough to support the spawning of shad.
   
   Calendar plants like Serviceberry are important for synchronizing the seasonal rounds of traditional Indigenous People, who move in an annual cycle through their homelands to where the foods are ready. Instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they changed themselves. Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance, by going to meet it when and where it arrives. A world of produce warehouses and grocery stores enables the practice of having what you want when you want it. We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs, rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us, each in its own time. These Serviceberries were not coerced, and their carbon footprint is nothing. Maybe that’s why they taste so good—they come only this time of years—these ephemeral sips of summer, without the aftertaste of harm.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. New York: Scribner, 2024. 9-10.

2. It is with some hesitation that the writer attempts a treatment of a genus which in the past has been subject to so much difference of opinion as Amelanchier. His only excuse is that field and herbarium studies covering a period of sixteen years, but more especially of four years, have led him to conclusions in regard to specific identity, relationship, and nomenclature which differ rather widely from those generally accepted at present.
   […] The principal cause of most of the difficulty experienced by the students of Amelanchier in the past in drawing specific lines [of relationship], is to be found undoubtedly in the wonderful variability which seems to exist within the genus, a variability so extreme that rarely did it seem possible to find two plants as much alike as specific identity in other groups would demand. Indeed, if the sheets of any large collection are sorted on any assumed basis, almost as many transitional sheets will be found as sheets typical of the supposed species. For this reason many taxonomists have been inclined to believe that no real specific lines exist, at least so far as the eastern species are concerned. Because of this wealth of form two courses have seemed possible: a conservative treatment in which very few species, sometimes only one, are recognized; or a radical one in which a great many species are supposed to exist.
   

K.M. Wiegand, “The Genus Amelanchier in Eastern North America,” Rhodora: Journal of the New England Botanical Club 14.163 (July 1912: 117-161), pp. 117, .

Supplementum

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Emergence Magazine (October 26, 2022).

• George Neville Jones, American Species of Amelanchier (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1946).

• Nina Foster, “Juneberry: A Summer Sweet for People, Pollinators, and Birds,” JStor Daily (June 27, 2025).

• “The Berry That Lost to the Blueberry,” Grub Americana (n.d.).

• Renée Kohlman, “Classic Canadian Dish: Saskatoon Pie,” Canadian Food Focus (n.d.).

Headnote

A weather update from outer space:

We are more than halfway through Solar Cycle 25, which unexpectedly peaked in October 2024, about one year earlier than predicted. Scientists observed a maximum of 161 sunspots around this time, a number that also exceeded expectations and which led to a period of more-prominent space weather events, according to CBS 17 News. Summer 2026 may be subject to a so-called “double peak,” as the sun’s other hemisphere (north or south) takes its turn churning through spots, flares, coronal mass ejections, and other phenomena. But the forecast for the next few years is rather quieter, as we approach the end of the current cycle in around 2030.

Though normal human persons rarely notice it, the solar cycle influences the type and intensity of radiation surging toward our planet at any given moment. The cycle names an 11-year-long process during which the sun’s magnetic activity builds in complexity, until the whole star eventually reverses its polarity, with magnetic north and south changing places due to the swirling movements of immense quantities of burning plasma. It’s a wild mess up/over there. And yet so much hinges on the sun, spots and all.

Sunspots (maculae solares in Latin) were first observed in China nearly 3000 years ago, in the I Ching, preceding Theophrastus’ observations in Ancient Greece by several centuries. They were made infamous by Galileo Galilei in 1612, when he circulated a pamphlet challenging Aristotle’s view that the sun was an unblemished, immutable sphere. That offense was cited two decades later, when he was imprisoned by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition (not to be confused with the earlier Spanish Inquisition).1 In theological and medical contexts, macula (meaning “spot” or “mark”) traditionally refers to either sin or the central retina, respectively. But the word has been used with various meanings over the past 600+ years and even may have lent a name to that spotted fish, the mackerel. Four centuries after the condemnation of Galileo’s heretical conclusions about sunspots, poet Simon Barraclough showered them with playful, word-radiating attention in his endearing, if esoteric, 2015 collection (excerpted below).2 As we approach the summer solstice this weekend, the solar influence on our days grows unignorable. However, it’s best to avoid any direct observation of the sun, which could lead to solar retinopathy and damage that precious macula of yours.

Readings

1. Whereas you, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, were denounced to this Holy Office in 1615 for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world and motionless and the earth moves even with diurnal motion; for having disciples to whom you taught the same doctrine; for being in correspondence with some German mathematicians about it; for having published some letters entitled On Sunspots, in which you explained the same doctrine as true; for interpreting Holy Scripture according to your own meaning in response to objections based on Scripture which were sometimes made to you; and whereas later we received a copy of an essay in the form of a letter, which was said to have been written by you to a former disciple of yours and which in accordance with Copernicus’ position contains various propositions against the authority and true meaning of the Holy Scripture;

   […]

   We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure. As a salutary penance we impose on you to recite the seven penitential Psalms once a week for the next three years. And we reserve the authority to moderate, change, or condone wholly or in part the above-mentioned penalties and penances.

Felice Cardinal d’Ascoli, et al. “Inquisition’s Sentence (22 June 1633).” The Essential Galileo. Edited and translated by Maurice A. Finocchiaro. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett, 2008. 279, 282.

2. For having risen and settled into her groove she begins to consider herself.

   For this she performs in eleven degrees.

   For first she does the Planck to strengthen core stability.

   For secondly she runs a malware scan for comets closing in.

   For thirdly she completes the paperwork for eclipses total, annular, and partial.

   For fourthly: flares.

   For fifthly she sorts her sunspots into pairs.

   For sixthly she gives neutrinos Priority Boarding.

   For seventhly she referees the arm-wrestling match between the upstart fusion and gravity.

   For eighthly she weaves flux ropes and thinks up skipping games.

   For ninthly she degausses her plasma screens.

   For tenthly she is profligate with her photons.

   For eleventhly: star jumps.

   For having considered herself she will consider her neighbors.

   For she runs a cloth around the ecliptic to make it gleam.

   For she oils the wheels of any planets gliding there.

   For she sends invites out to wallflowers in the Oort cloud.

   For she issues shadows for children to dodge as they make their way to school.

   For she shakes out her blankets for devotees of helioseismology.

   For when she takes her prey she plays with it to give it a chance.

   For one planet in nine escapes by her dallying.

   For in her morning orisons she loves the Earth and the Earth loves her.

Simon Barraclough. Sunspots. London, England: Penned in the Margins, 2015.

Supplementum

• Simon Barraclough, “From Sunspots.” Poetry (December 2015).

• Kate Howells, “It’s Not Magic; It’s Magnetic!” The Planetary Report (June 9, 2025).

• Adam Green, “The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings (1882).” The Public Domain Review (Dec. 14, 2026).

• Richard Webb, “Spotty Record: Four Centuries of Sunspot Pictures.” New Scientist (September 16, 2013).

• “Glossary Term: Sunspot.” International Astronomical Union, Office of Astronomy for Education (2020-2026).

Headnote

Along the same walk that I first encountered the wool sower wasp, I found an old friend. No, not that type of old friend—just a flower I’ve come to know over the past nine or so years. It has a delicate yet visceral form, immediately striking and beautiful but a bit gory if you think about it for too long. It’s the type of plant that seems to have nearly universal appeal, spawning refined social and scientific clubs while also luring weirdos out into the woods. For independent botanist and artist Grace Greylock Niles, whose work and story are worth knowing, this flower took the front page of her best-known book, the marvelously titled Bog-Trotting for Orchids. And rumors are that it is illegal to pick or dig (in reality, that is only true on federal lands).

The pink lady’s slipper, or moccasin flower (Cypripedium acaule), is a perennial “slipper orchid” in the varied and cosmopolitan orchid family (Orchidaceae). Native to the eastern woodlands of North America, the plant requires specific conditions to grow and bloom, including acidic, well-drained soils: it often prefers gentle slopes in pine forests, where it can appear alone or in colonies. Like all orchids, the pink lady’s slipper also requires the presence of a specific mycorrhizal fungus in the soil, which breaks open and nourishes the otherwise helpless seed. The orchid acts in a slightly parasitic relationship with the fungus, using it as a surrogate root system to obtain water and nutrients from the soil. Because of these exacting requirements, a moccasin flower can take two years to establish a seedling and anywhere from 5 to 16 years to produce its first flower. However, once established, an individual plant can live for decades (some say a half century or more) and expand rhizomatically to form a colony of clones.

The species name, acaule (Latin for “stemless”), seems misleading because the flower very noticeably rises on a stalk; however, this stalk is technically a scape, rather than a stem, and carries no leaves. Instead, two broad basal leaves emerge directly from the ground, green and hairy above, grayer beneath, with conspicuously raised parallel veins. These leaves persist through summer long after the flower has gone to seed. The flower itself is a labellum (from the Latin for “little lip”), inflated and heavily veined, with two narrow, twisted petals extending outward to either side. The blossom lures bumblebees inward with a sweet fragrance, but offers no nectar; the bee enters through a slit in the pouch, works its way through the narrow interior passage, and exits bearing a load of pollen for which it received nothing in return—except, perhaps, the experience? The plant’s roots contain high concentrations of cypripedin (“American valerian”), especially in late fall and early spring, and were used historically as a light sedative or calming agent to support menstruation and alleviate headaches or insomnia. The substance is now being studied in relationship to cancers. But you probably shouldn’t dig up an orchid for your backyard science project, especially if it’s a pink lady’s slipper.

Readings

1. Many people are accustomed to think of the orchid as a tropical flower which grows in our country only in cultivation and under highly artificial conditions. It is, however, true that many of the most attractive species of this beautiful group are endemic to most parts of the United States. There are to-day, accord- ing to conservative reports, from twenty-seven to thirty genera and from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty species of native orchids found in North America, north of Mexico. Most of these are terrestrial or earth-loving. There are eleven epiphytes, all of which are found only in the Southern States. The range of the North American orchids extends wherever sunshine and moisture prevail, nearly as far north as the Arctic Circle. Four Cypripediums grow between latitudes 54° and 64°, and from fifteen to eighteen species of the Orchid Family are natives of Alaska.

   […]

   Two-Leaved Lady’s Slipper — Stemless Pink Moccasin-Flower

   The specific name, acaule, refers to the lowly and humble (acaulescent), growth of the species, since the flower is stemless, arising from a short or subterranean stem.

   Sphagnous bogland, conifer or mixed woodland orchid with fleshy-fibrous roots. May 19th-June 20th.

   Flowers large, pink-purple, solitary, terminal, stemless. Labellum shoe-shaped, 2-2 1/2 inches long, bi-lobed, pendulous, with closed fissure down its whole length, edges inflected, downy interiorly; pink-purple with darker veining of purple. (Rarely pure white flowers occur, with crome yellow sepals and petals.) Sepals and petals brown-purple and green, shorter than labellum; two lower sepals wholly united. Stem very short, obscured by the basal leaves. Scape naked, 8-18 inches high, single-flowered, terminal. Few instances where two flowers or buds in embryo have occurred. Leaves 2, sheathing the base of peduncle, oblanceolate 3-5 nerved, hirsute and thickened; 6-8 inches long, 2-3 inches wide, resembling the leaves of Orchis spedabilis Linnaeus.

   Continental Range — From Newfoundland, and Fort Franklin, in latitude 54°-64° North; southward to Lookout Mountain, Mentone, and Cullman, Alabama; westward to northern Indiana, Minnesota, and Kentucky.

   New England Range — Maine, common; New Hampshire, common; Vermont, abundant; Massachusetts, abundant; Rhode Island, common; Connecticut, common.

Grace Greylock Niles. Bog-Trotting for Orchids (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1904), p. vi, 147.

2. C'est une belle espèce qui pousse court; elle est originaire de l'Amérique du nord. Elle est bien distincte. Les fleurs sont très grandes; elles ont 5 cent . et plus de longueur, et sortent de feuilles larges, opposées, ovales, poilues, supportées sur des tiges de 15 centimètres de hauteur. Les fleurs sont de couleurvariable; elles sont ordinairement d'un beau rose, quelquefois ombré de blanc. C'est un des genres que l'on cultive le plus facilement en bordure ou dans une partie ombrée sur un rocher. Fleurit en juin.

F. Desbois. “Cypripedium De Plein Terre.” Monographie de Cypripedium (Gand [Ghent]: Librairie Générale de Ad. Hoste, 1888), p. 26.

3. To the unscientific lover of flowers the name Lady’s Slipper brings up a delightful vision of a quaint rose-colored flower, with an airy balloon-like pouch. This is the C. acaule, or Pink Lady’s Slipper, the most common of all the varieties. Rising erect and graceful on its slender stalk, it may be found in dry or moist woods in May and June.
   
   Elaine Goodale speaks of it as “ shy and proud,” and it is not as difficult to realize that this Slipper and the spectabile are related to the curious tropical varieties we see exhibited as rarities, as their more modest-appearing sisters.
   
   The flower stem with the flower is from ten to fifteen inches high and springs directly from between the two large ribbed oval, lanceolate root leaves. The other Lady’s Slippers, as can be seen from the illustration, have stem leaves.
   
   Somehow, to me, this large, pink blossom, nodding brightly in every breeze, has a happier appearance than any of the others; and although the Showy is undoubtedly the handsomest, I love the Pink Lady’s Slipper best.

C.S. Young. “Fashion Five. Cypripedium acaule Stemless Lady’s Slipper.” All of Nature's Fashions in Lady's Slippers for the Northern and Eastern Parts of the United States (Boston: Bradlee Whidden, 1885), n.p.

Supplementum

• “Pink Lady Slipper Fact Sheet.” Signs of the Seasons: A New England Phenology Program. The University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

• Kristen Goodhue, “Medicine, Myth and the Lady’s Slipper Orchid.” Shorelines: Life and science at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (August 7, 2015).

• Grace [Greylock] Niles, “The Origin of Plant Names.” The Plant World 5.8 (1902): 141–44.

• Grace Greylock Niles, The Hoosac Valley: Its Legends and Its Stories (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1912).

• Henry Baldwin, The Orchids of New England: A Popular Monograph (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1894).

Headnote

We thought they were fungal. Or maybe even artificial.

Crystallized dandelion seeds.

Speckled balls of styrofoam.

Pink and white lollipops.

The confusion was not ours alone. Since at least Aristotle, who held that insects could arise spontaneously from rotting vegetable matter, it was widely believed that galls and the insects that emerged from them were products of the tree itself—a kind of arboreal spontaneous generation. Even Francesco Redi of Arezzo, whose controlled experiments on rotting meat in 1668 are credited with first seriously challenging the doctrine of spontaneous generation, still believed that the oak galls were essentially eggs laid by the tree itself.

But no, they were the galls of the wool sower wasp (Callirhytis seminator), a harmless, parasitic wasp that chemically manipulates white oak trees into creating edible nests for its larvae. The hijacking happens in stages. Unlike the fig-friendly family of Agaonidae wasps, gall wasps do not pollinate the tree’s fruit to support its growth. Instead, a female wool sower wasp injects its eggs into a bud on the oak tree along with a maternal fluid that dissolves some of the plant cells, suppresses the tree’s defense systems, and seemingly halts the growth of the bud. When the larva hatch, they begin to secrete enzymes and other chemicals of their own, which hormonally alter the tree’s growth patterns and change nearly a third of its genetic expression. Now, instead of growing branches, buds, and leaves, the tree instead creates a novel structure specifically tailored to feed and protect the larva. In fact, the entire tree system is hijacked in service of the gall and redirects nutrients away from the leaves and fruit, funneling them into the gall to sustain the developing wasp.

The process is similar, but with many interesting variations, across the approximately 1400 members of the Cynipidae family, although some use the galls created by other gall wasps (as inquilines) rather than create their own. The cecidiologists who dedicate themselves to the study of plant galls are like kids in an alien candy shop filled with strange slimes, jellies, hunks, orbs, and pellets. And the gall wasps themselves are as surprising as their genetically pirated abodes. For most members of the Cynipidae family are heterogonic, alternating their reproductive characteristics each generation: while the first generation reproduces sexually, with male and female individuals, the second generation comprises all females, which reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis—a sort of cloning or virgin birth that produces a mix of female and male offspring, all without fertilization. In fact, some species have done away entirely with sexual reproduction and are made up only of females. For the wool sower wasp, its fuzzy lollipop gall incubates the asexual generation of larva; but no one yet knows what form of gall is created by its sexual generation.

This strange science also precipitated an unexpected cultural turn. For we owe much of European manuscript culture to the brown spheres produced by the asexual reproduction of the marble gall wasp (Andricus kollari) and other branches of the Cynipidae family. For approximately 1500 years, from the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the 20th century, these hard, nut-like galls became the primary media of textual culture, crushed and used to create an acidic ink that could permanently mark parchment, vellum, and paper. Notable documents from the text of Beowulf and a plethora of monastic manuscripts to the Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, and The Declaration of Independence were written in oak gall ink. Ironically, though, the acid that made this ink so indelible is now eating away at these documents, threatening to erase the textual record it enabled in the first place. Instead of spontaneous generation, the archivists now are dealing not with spontaneous corrosion.

Readings

1. Before going further, let us glance for a moment at the different types of insects possessing this gall-making habit.
   
   The Hymenoptera, best known because of the industrious honeybee, has two important families, the Cynipidae and the Tenthredinidae, members of which live in this questionable manner. The first named are minute, four-winged gall flies with legless white maggots. They are moderately numerous in species and remarkable for an alternation of generations: the structural variations between the adults in different generations being so marked, that before the relationship was suspected, they were referred to separate genera. Certain Cynipids or gall wasps are believed to reproduce only by parthenogenesis. These little insects display a marked partiality for oaks and roses and produce striking types of galls, such as the cortical swellings of the gouty oak gall, a species occasionally becoming so abundant that five hundred thousand individuals may be reared from one tree and its conspicuous galls form giant, bead-like swellings on almost all the smaller branches of a large oak. Occasionally the peculiar bud-like swellings of Andricus gemmarius Ashm. are very abundant on pin oaks and the sweet exudation issuing therefrom attracts hosts of bees, flies and similar insects. Another oak gall occasionally numerous is the oak leaf stalk gall.? The gall of the wool sower? is another striking type and results from the female depositing eggs in a ring of buds around white oak stems, and from the series of wounds inflicted, there develops a seemingly delicate, globose, white, pink-spotted mass which on examination is found to consist of numerous cells, each supported and guarded by a thick fungoid, hairy growth. A more ordinary type may be seen in the familiar banded bullet gall,* a representative of a considerable series generally known as “bullet galls.”

E.P. Felt, “Gall Insects and Their Relations to Plants.” [Gaul Insect Papers]. Np, n.d. Rpt. The Scientific Monthly (June 1918: 509-525). pp. 510-511.

2. [I]f I must disclose my real feeling in the matter, I would state my belief that fruits, vegetables, trees and leaves become wormy in two ways. One way is that the worms come in from outside, and, seeking food, gnaw a path to the very heart of the fruit and the wood. The other way, which I esteem worthy of credence, is to be found in the peculiar potency of that soul or principle which creates the flowers and fruits of living plants, and is the same that produces the worms of these plants. Who knows? Perhaps many of the fruits of trees are produced with a secondary, rather than a primary purpose, not as pre-eminent in themselves, but as objects of utility, destined as a matrix for the generation of these worms, which remain in them for a determined length of time, and thence come forth to enjoy the sunshine.

   
   I think that my idea will not seem paradoxical to you, if you consider the great variety of growths, such as glands, galls, knobs, warts, etc., produced by oaks, holm oaks, live oaks, and other acorn-bearing trees. In the hairy tufts of the oak, and in the woody tufts of the ilex, and in the galls of the holm oak leaf, it is manifest that the first and principal intention of Nature is to create therein a winged animal, for there is an tgg in the interior of the gall, and this egg enlarges and matures in proportion to the development of the gall, and finally gives birth to the worm, which, when the gall has reached maturity, becomes a fly, that breaking the egg and commencing to gnaw the gall, makes a narrow and always round road from the center to the circumference, and abandoning its native prison, escapes and flies boldly away in search of food.
   
   I confess to you frankly that before making these experiments in the generation of insects I believed, or rather suspected, that galls were originated by the fly[…] Hence, I have changed my opinion, and I think it probable that the generation of worms in trees does not occur fortuitously, nor does it proceed from the eggs deposited by flies, especially as every gall or growth has its own peculiar kind of worm, gnat, or fly, which never varies. It is wonderful with what consummate skill Nature forms the egg and prepares a place for it ; admirable is the industry and patience with which she surrounds it in a network of fibres and filaments, connecting it with the gall, like so many veins or arteries, which furnish the necessary supply for the formation of the egg and the worm, and the indispensable nourishment of both.

Francesco Redi of Arezzo, Experiments on the Generation of Insects (1688), trans. Mab Bigelow (Chicago, Open Court, 1909), pp. 91-92, 94.

Supplementum

• Adam Kranz, et al. Gallformers.org.

• Joe Boggs, “Cotton Balls on Oak Trees” (May 28, 2024) and “Oak ‘Apples’ and the Gall-Making Process“ (May 12, 2017). Buckeye Yard and Garden Online, The Ohio State University.

• “Making Manuscripts: Oak Gall Ink,” The British Library (November 22, 2018).

• Nathalie Roy, “Make Ancient Ink With The Help Of Oak Tree Parasites,” Science Friday (August 21, 2024).

• Usha Lee McFarling, “Making Ink from Oak Galls,” The Huntington Library and Museum (May 1, 2019).

Headnote

Are you looking for Rumi-related AI slop? Well, YouTube has it! (No links provided here.) Perhaps this is not surprising. Since his introduction into English and Western European languages during the nineteenth century, Rumi went on to become a bestseller in the 1990s and early 2000s, featured prominently across Oprah’s multimedia empire and even recited on a Coldplay album. Of course, making him the most popular poet in the U.S. required some translators/adapters and publishers to excise many of his cultural, historical, and linguistic particularities, including most traces of Islam. As a good student of literature, I know that these missing elements could expand and nuance, rather than hinder, appreciation of this important poet and Sufi, even for so-called Western readers. That being said, his writing evokes many spheres of nature and human experience in addition to mystical ecstasy and religious devotion. Consider the reed.

Traditional end-blown flutes such as the nay are made primarily from the giant reed (Arundo donax), a tall perennial cane with a moderate circumference, or from varieties of bamboo, yucca, or… grass (?). But the common reed (Phragmites australis) still has some claim to musical history, as uber-niche archaeologists, musicologists, and wind-instrument enthusiasts are wont to argue. Long live the ancient aulos revival! In reminding us of the reed’s relationship to its “source” and to “fire” (many flutes require heat to achieve their necessary form and durability), Rumi transforms a soggy plant into a symbol of what is most human, most divine, most primordial in us: the “pain of love-desire,” borne of our “separations” and calling us back to our source. When he also compares the reed to wine, I can’t help but think that he is imagining its maroon-burgundy tassel, or panicle—one of my favorite sights in the blowing summer wind.

The common reed (Phragmites australis) is a flowering wetland grass in a subfamily of the Poaceae, or true grasses, family, along with the bamboos and cereal grains. In other words, it is a littoral relative of the corn, rice, wheat, oats, millet, barley, and sugarcane that feed most of the world, not to mention the turf in your backyard. The common reed can be found at the water’s edge around the world and has often been considered a single species. However, taxonomies for the plant were a bit muddled until 1968, when a British botanist reviewed the history of classifications and revived the now-current designation from an eighteenth century Spanish botanist.

And now, morphological studies and genetic sequencing indicate significant variations within Phragmites australis, which likely will be differentiated into multiple species, including a North American genotype that has largely been replaced across that continent by a rival Eurasian haplotype. This Eurasian variety, currently considered a subspecies, has been aggressively spreading since its “cryptic invasion” at some point in the last 150 years: a bed of “phrag” can expand through underground rhizomatic growth and above-ground stolons up to several inches per day, and 20 feet per year. Its pressure on other species and destruction of prior ecosystems can be immense. Yet the durability and sheer mass of such thickets can be beneficial for purifying polluted ecosystems, stabilizing coastal and riparian zones, and absorbing atmospheric carbon. Death and life are not always a zero-sum game. Again—consider the cut, burned, empty, beautiful reed.

Readings

1. Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations—

   Saying, “Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament hath caused man and woman to moan.

   
   I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold (to such a one) the pain of love-desire.

   
   Every one who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united with it.

   
   In every company I uttered my wailful notes, I consorted with the unhappy and with them that rejoice.

   
   Every one became my friend from his own opinion; none sought out my secrets from within me.

   
   My secret is not far from my plaint, but ear and eye lack the light (whereby it should be apprehended).

   
   Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, yet none is permitted to see the soul.

   
   This noise of the reed is fire, it is not wind: whoso hath not this fire, may he be naught!

   
   ‘Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, ‘tis the fervour of Love that is in the wine.

   
   The reed is the comrade of every one who has been parted from a friend: its strains pierced our hearts.

   
   Who ever saw a poison and antidote like the reed? Who ever saw a sympathiser and a longing lover like the reed?

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, from “Proem to Book 1,” The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, Volume II. Trans. Reynold A. Nicholson. (London: E.J.W. Gibb Memorial, 1960 [1926]), p. 5.

2. The Reed may be said to be ubiquitous in both time and space, for it is found in Britain alone in Preglacial beds everywhere, Interglacial beds in Hants, Sussex, Lincs, Neolithic beds in the Thames Valley, Yorks, Glamorgan. It is found in the N. Temperate and Arctic regions in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and in Australia. This common aquatic plant is found throughout Great Britain, except in East Sutherland, as far north as the Shetlands, and in the Channel Islands.

   The common Reed is one of those familiar aquatic plants which has a place in the popular mind on account of its very universality, and because it forms in itself a characteristic botanical formation, a reed-swamp association. It grows in still water as well as running water, in lakes and rivers, nowhere more luxuriantly than in the meres of the E. counties or the tarns and lochs of Scotland, at two very different elevations.

   The stem is round, tall, graceful, erect, arising from a jointed creeping rhizome, and stoloniferous, with creeping shoots. The leaves are long, flat, broad, rigid, with the margins hairy, and bluish-green below. The leaf-sheath is round, turned one way, and smooth. In a wind the leaf turns partly round like a flag.

   The panicle is nodding, purple, soft and silky, branched, large, and dense, with smooth branches. The spikelets are 5-flowered, the flowers longer than the glumes, and glossy. The empty ones are the flowering glumes, awl-shaped, and longer. The florets in the spikelet are distant, with long silky hairs which form a parachute.

   The Reed is 3—10 ft. high. It flowers in July and August. The plant is a herbaceous perennial, propagated by soboles or creeping runners. The lower flowers are male, the others are bisexual, the panicles containing
   3—6 flowers, being densely crowded. As in most other grasses the stamens are 3, the styles short, and the stigmas feathery. The lowest glumes are 1—3-androus, the others 3-androus. The flowers are anemophilous, proterogynous.

   The fruit is enveloped in the glume, and this in long silky hairs, and is light, and adapted to dispersal by the wind.

   The Reed is a peat-loving plant, luxuriating in peat soil or clay soil, and it is then a clay-loving plant.

   […]

   Phragmites, Trinius, is from the Greek phragma, fence, with reference to a spurious dissepiment at the nodes; and the second name indicates its universal character.

   This graceful grass is called Bennels, Bog Reed, Ditch Reed, Doudle, Pole Reed, Pull Reed, Pull Spear, Reed, Speargrass, Spire, Streeds, Windlestraws. The name Bennels is applied to a kind of mat, made of reeds woven together, used for forming partitions in cottages, or laid across the rafters to form an inner roof. The name Doudle is “the root of the common reed grass found partially decayed in morasses, of which the children in the south of Scotland make a sort of musical instrument similar to the oaten pipe of the ancients.”

   The Reed was used traditionally by witches to fly upon. It is used for thatching, and a specimen thus used a hundred years ago is as fresh as if recently gathered. It is used for protecting sea embankments, for ceilings to cottages, verandas, rustic buildings, for plaster floors, for screens, and for hot-beds in kitchen gardens. Wool is dyed green by the flowers. The roots have been used for liver complaints. Mats are made of it, and formerly it was used for pens for black-letter type.

A.R. Horwood, “Reed (Phragmites communis, Trin.),” A New British Flora:
British Wild Flowers in Their Natural Haunts, Vol. IV (London: The Gresham Publishing Company, Ltd., 1919), pp. 161-164.

Supplementum

• “Translations and Versions of “The Song of the Reed” (Masnavi, Book 1: LInes 1-34).” The American Institute of Masnavi Studies (n.d.).

• Kat Thornton, “Rumi for the New-Age Soul: Coleman Barks and the Problems of Popular Translations.” Ajam Media Collective (March 9, 2015).

• Barnaby Brown, “Phragmites australis vs Arundo donax.” The Workshop of Dionysus (September 16, 2019).

• “Where is Phragmites Found?,” The Great Lakes Phragmites Collaborative (2026).

• "Common Reed,” from “Ethnobotany of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands,” Texas Beyond History (2008).

• “Common reed,” Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States (2018).

This week goes long on history and biology—the latter not my forte. Bear with me as I venture into the science of the small. The surprising story is worth it.

Headnote

They’re in the soil. You may have heard that a single teaspoon of soil contains tens of billions of individual microorganisms—far more than the total population of currently living humans, and perhaps approaching the total number of humans who have ever walked this planet. Indeed, recent research suggests that more than half of all species on Earth dwell primarily beneath our feet, in the microcosmos of infinitesimal life. And common among these tiny dirt dwellers are some very interesting and important “old friends” that we humans should get to know better: bacteria, parasites, and other microbes (viruses, fungi, and protozoa) that offer many known and potential benefits to humans.

In his 1665 book, Micrographia, English scientist Robert Hooke produced a striking illustration of the fruiting structures of “blue mould” (something in the genus Mucor), thereby offering humans our first glimpse of the microscopic realm. When the eccentric Dutch experimentalist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed bacteria in 1676, he referred to the amusing little things he observed squirming in water as “animalcules.” Scientific wonder at these tiny forms grew into public fear roughly two centuries later, when the germ theory of disease gradually replaced belief in miasmas, and biologists realized that bacteria were responsible for horrifying diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, though, things have come full circle. We now know that bacteria and other microorganisms, even viruses and parasites, operate as an “invisible organ,” hidden body, or “second human genome” within us, playing many crucial roles: digesting complex carbohydrates, producing essential vitamins, educating our immune systems, and shielding the body from harmful pathogens. We are, in fact, holobionts. Microbes also play crucial roles outside of our bodies, in agriculture and food preparation, industry and biotechnology—microscopic cyanobacteria, after all, generated the planet’s breathable atmosphere. How did we get here?

In 1971, immunologists noticed that people living near Lake Kyoga in central Uganda responded better to the vaccine for leprosy than people in other regions of the world. They connected this vaccine response to a strain of Mycobacteria vaccae (from vacca, Latin for “cow,” from which, via cowpox, we also get the word vaccine).1 This bacteria was so abundant in the local environment that it lent a bright orange-yellow tint to the mud surrounding the lake. Thus began a radical revision of modern germ theory. The existence of good germs means that sterility is not synonymous with health; and while hygiene is still crucial, so is biodiversity—not just out in nature, but around us and inside us.

When later researchers tested Mycobacteria vaccae as an immunotherapy for lung cancer patients, they were surprised to find that, although treatment did not extend the patients lives, it significantly improved their mental health. Why this unexpected side effect? Follow-up studies identified the specific mechanism, revealing that exposure to the bacteria stimulated serotonin production and helped regulate stress responses in mice. The notion of a “dirt antidepressant” made headlines, further research confirmed the near-immediate benefits of direct contact with plants and soil, and wellness entrepreneurs rushed to commoditize yet another miracle-promising supplement. Pardon me if I go do some weeding in my garden instead.

Mycobacterium vaccae is a nonpathogenic bacteria commonly found in soil around the world. It is a saprophyte, or saprotroph, meaning that it feeds off of decaying matter, secreting enzymes to break down dead organic matter or waste and absorbing whatever nutrients emerge. This bacteria has extensive immunoregulatory and anti-inflammatory properties that are being explored; and, through microbial prospecting, a strain of it can even be used to find oil. The Mycobacterium genus includes several infamous disease-causing species, including those responsible for tuberculosis and leprosy. But other mycobacteria are being studied for potential medical and health applications, ranging from treatment of cancers (Mycobacterium obuense) and allergy-induced asthma (Mycobacterium phlei) to remediation of polluted soils (Mycobacterium chitae). After a week of perusing the bacterial universe, I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface.

Readings

1. Bacteria are the original synthesizers. Although bacteria are simple single cell organisms, they are a biological force adapting to and accessing minute resources in severe climates such as the Arctic or the deep sea. This adaptability has made bacteria the most genetically diverse and abundant (in mass and number) organisms. In their chemical and physical resource cultivation, they impact both their micro and macro ecosystems. On the macro scale, for example, bacteria generated oxygen stores that contributed to the creation of the ozone layer. The ozone layer was critical in reducing harmful effects of sunlight on evolving DNA. Bacteria also created greenhouse gases to warm the earth so that the climate was ripe for evolution of higher organisms. Even now, bacteria are profound players in the contemporary terrestrial economy.

   Bacteria thrive if conditions are favorable; they mutate, migrate, die, or lie

   senescent if conditions are not favorable. They consume, reproduce, deplete their resources, and release waste products. As bacteria express themselves (i.e. live), they alter their habitat. They synthesize new environments or landscapes, thereby producing new ecological niches for other organisms. As such, they offer a field for mapping the rhythms and patterns constitutive of life.

Jenifer Wightman, “Winogradsky Rothko: Bacterial Ecosystem as Pastoral Landscape.” Journal of Visual Culture 7.3 (December 2008: 309-334), p. 312.

2. Which organisms from the natural environment are important in addition to those from animals? Although there is no direct evidence linking soil consumption to health benefits, it is evident that soil is a significant source of microbial exposure in natural settings. Soil microorganisms become airborne in dust during dry conditions, but also when raindrops impact the soil, because tiny explosions of soil organisms occur, releasing them into the air. Additionally, soil organisms settle on food, particularly in farmers' markets where washing and packaging are minimal. Moreover geophagy (consumption of soil) is an evolved behaviour. It is probable that all vertebrates, especially in early life, engage in it, and the green iguana is a well-studied example of this. Many primate species, including gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees have been observed eating soil. Geophagy is a common practice in many cultures, and is frequently observed during pregnancy, not only in underdeveloped rural societies but also in Western cultures where it is often considered a pathological manifestation of pica. Many of the Treg-inducing and immunoregulation-enhancing strains of bacteria are found in soil.

Graham A.W. “The Old Friends Hypothesis: Evolution, Immunoregulation and Essential Microbial Inputs.” Frontiers of Allergy 4 (September 12, 2023), p. 8.

3. Context Inflammation is increasingly recognized as contributing to the pathogenesis of major depressive disorder (MDD), even in individuals who are otherwise medically healthy. Most studies in search of sources for this increased inflammation have focused on factors such as psychosocial stress and obesity that are known to activate inflammatory processes and increase the risk for depression. However, MDD may be so prevalent in the modern world not just because proinflammatory factors are widespread, but also because we have lost contact with previously available sources of anti-inflammatory, immunoregulatory signaling.
   

   Objective To examine evidence that disruptions in coevolved relationships with a variety of tolerogenic microorganisms that were previously ubiquitous in soil, food, and the gut, but that are largely missing from industrialized societies, may contribute to increasing rates of MDD in the modern world.

   […]

   Conclusion Measured exposure to the old friends or their antigens may offer promise for the prevention and treatment of MDD in modern industrialized societies.

Charles L. Raison, Christopher A. Lowry, and Graham A.W. Rook. "Inflammation, Sanitation, and Consternation: Loss of Contact With Coevolved, Tolerogenic Microorganisms and the Pathophysiology and Treatment of Major Depression." Archives of General Psychiatry 67.12 (December 2010): 1211–1224.

Supplementum

• “Getting Dirty May Lift Your Mood,” University of Bristol (April 2, 2007)."

• Lisa Marshall, “Stalking the Dirt Vaccine.” Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine (The University of Colorado Boulder: September 28, 2018).

• Chris Lowry, “The Old Friends Hypothesis & the M. Vaccae Story.” The Microbiome Summit (2019).

• “Soil Quotes,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service (n.d.).

• Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, “Observations, communicated to the publisher by Mr. Antony van Leewenhoeck, in a dutch letter of the 9th Octob. 1676. here English'd: concerning little animals by him observed in rain-well-sea- and snow water; as also in water wherein pepper had lain infused.” Philosophical Transactions R. Society 12.133 (March 25, 1677): 821–831.

Headnote

The lilac—so pure, so sweet, so artificial. Although only 20 to 25 species of lilacs exist in the wild, more than 2,000 named cultivars (according to the official International Lilac Registrar) have been developed, most over the past 150 years. Beginning in the 1870s, French botanists Victor and Marie Louise Lemoine began using needles, tweezers, and paintbrushes to delicately cross the common lilac—native to the Balkan Peninsula but common throughout Europe—with species from China and other regions, creating spectacular double-flowered and early-blooming hybrids. Other breeders around the world followed suit, leading to an explosion of new varieties, actual plants, and public interest. The numerous cultivars now require a color code for reference and classification: I (White), II (Violet), III (Blue), IV (Lilac), V (Pink), VI (Magenta), and VII (Purple)—with some European organizations also recognizing VIII (Creamy Yellow.)

The flowers are just as abundant in literary and musical texts, featuring prominently in poems by Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell (see below), and even Hannah Arendt; short stories by the wonderful Kate Chopin and the lesser-known Aleksandr Kuprin; prose by Henry David Thoreau and Marcel Proust; and, of course, in various renditions of the sultry, melancholic ballad, “Lilac Wine.” If mosses are divine, then lilacs are carnal.

The common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) is a flowering deciduous shrub in the olive family (Oleaceae). This family, which includes approximately 28 genera and 700 species, such as olive, ash, jasmine, and forsythia, is grouped in the order of mints (Lamiales, not to be confused with the specific mint family, Lamiaceae). And this order is characterized by several features: (1) paired rotating leaves—or “opposite decussate phyllotaxis,” in botanical terms; (2) bilateral, two-lipped flowers that are fused into a tube; (3) reduced reproductive organs, including two or four stamens; and (4) strong scent oils concentrated in microscopic glandular hairs, or trichomes, that blanket the leaves and stems. Of course, lilacs differ from this final trait in concentrating their volatile scent oils exclusively within their flowers, replacing the general defense mechanism of the mints with a targeted, highly volatile aromatic lure for spring pollinators—“sweet and heady,” indeed.

Readings

1. Lilacs,

   False blue,

   White,

   Purple,

   Color of lilac.

   Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,

   Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,

   Lilac in me because I am New England,

   Because my roots are in it,

   Because my leaves are of it,

   Because my flowers are for it,

   Because it is my country

   And I speak to it of itself

   And sing of it with my own voice

   Since certainly it is mine.

Amy Lowell, “Lilacs” (The New York Evening Post, 1920), rpt. What’s O’Clock (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925), pp. 68-74.

2. In May when the lilac is in flower, admiration is expressed for it on every side; even the most indifferent observer cannot restrain himself from manifesting his appreciation of the flower, praising its beauty and expressing a wish that it might be employed more frequently than it is in garden work. The gardener realizes that in this shrub we have particularly valuable material for gardens and parks, and recently unusual interest has been taken in it. Great collections, embracing hundreds of varieties, have been planted at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, and at Highland Park in Rochester. This year at Highland Park, when the lilacs were at their best, they were inspected by over 30,000 visitors in one day, who had only words of appreciation and admiration for them.

William C. Barry, The Lilac (Rochester, NY: Mount Hope Nurseries), p. [2]. Rpt. from Horticulture (Oct. 9, 1909).

3. Offering a light, lilac wine, sweet and heady, Miami circled, here and there. She had a cincture of white rose-oleanders, and a bandeau of blue convolvoli. She held a fan.
   
   “Or do you care for anyt’ing else?” she was enquiring, automatically, of Mr. Musket (the Father of three very common girls), as a melodious tinkle of strings announced the advent of the minstrels from Broken Hill.
   
   Following the exodus roadward, it was agreeable to reach the outer air.
   
   Under the high trees by the yard-door gate, the array of vehicles and browsing quadrupeds was almost as numerous as upon a Market day. Coming and going between the little Café of the “Forty Parrots” (with its Bar, spelled Biar in twinkling lights), the quiet village road was agog, with bustling folk, as perhaps never before. All iris in the dusk, a few loosely-loinclothed young men, had commenced dancing aloofly among themselves, bringing down some light (if bitter) banter from the belles.
   
   Pirouetting with these, Miami recognized the twinkling feet of her brother Charlie, a lad who preferred roaming the wide savannah country after butterflies with his net, to the ever-increasing etiquette of his home.

Ronald Firbank, Sorrow in Sunlight (London: Brentano’s Ltd., 1924), pp. 27-28.

Supplementum

• Sinead Campbell, “Life of a Song: Lilac Wine — Nina Simone put her stamp on an intoxicating ballad,” Financial Times (July 14, 2024).

• David Doochin, “The Unknown French Horticulturist Who Made Lilacs Happen,” Atlas Obscura (June 28 2016).

• Kai Potter, “Lilacs Tell a Story,” The Provincetown Independent (June 16, 2021).

• John C. Wister, Lilac Culture (New York: Orange Judd Publishing Company, 1936).

• Growing Lilacs, Home and Garden Bulletin No. 19 (Washington, DC: Agricultural Research Service, 1973).

Headnote

It’s worth at least checking your bedrock. You may find a surprising history beneath your feet.

As for me and my apartment, the story goes something like this:

A while back, when the continents were arranged much differently, the bedrock of present-day Boston was adrift on the Iapetus Ocean as part of a microcontinent called Avalonia. More or less a chain of volcanic islands, Avalonia had split off from the supercontinent of Gondwana together with parts of what are now the UK and northern Europe. When all dry land on the planet eventually converged into the mother of all continents, Pangaea, the islands of Avalonia were crushed between the tectonic plates of Baltica (Europe) and later Laurentia (North America). So they rested until Pangea broke apart, and the Atlantic Ocean rifted Avalonia into two parts: New England and parts of Canada to the west, and old England and parts of Europe to the east.

The fault line where Avalonia fused to Laurentia is visible in a few places across Massachusetts, including the so-called “Bloody Bluff” in Lexington. The land to the east of this bluff, where I live, shares rocks and fossils and other subtle features with the hills of Wales and other regions across the wide ocean. So while the flora and fauna of surrounding Boston may be part of North America, the region’s bedrock originated from another continent entirely. We live atop strange layers of time and stuff; but as Wittgenstein notes below, sometimes what we are looking for is less the facts of the matter than the knowledge that they exist.

As a sedimentary rock, Cambridge Argillite likely was formed off the coast of Avalonia, when a combination of underwater currents and submarine mudslides laid down thick layers of fine-grained silt in what eventually would become the Boston basin. This mud was later buried, compacted, and lightly metamorphosed, creating a dense grey rock (or sometimes purplish-grey) that looks like shale but breaks into irregular chunks rather than thin sheets. Such characteristics created many headaches when they were digging the subway tunnels under my current apartment. But Cambridge Argillite also provides a generally stable foundation for heavy urban infrastructure, and has conductive properties that make it suitable for shallow geothermal applications, including under my kids’ school. Rock on.

Readings

1. “How am I able to obey a rule?”—if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.

   If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”

   
   (Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the definition a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1953), §217 (p. 85).

2. Its colours are grey and red. Of grey, it occurs bluish grey and blackish grey; these are disposed sometimes in stripes or spots; and of red, it occurs brownish purple red. The surface is sometimes rendered beautifully pavonine, irised and chatoyant from the presence of Oxide of Iron.
   

   Its lustre is glimmering.

   
   It is opaque.

   
   It is amorphous.

   
   The streak is pearl grey.

   
   It is moderately hard.

   
   The fracture is fine grained uneven , passing in some specimens, into imperfectly straight foliated, and in others into earthy, and it is always slaty.

   
   It is moderately tough.

   
   It is easily frangible.

   
   The fragments are tabular and splintery, and often perfectly

   rhomboidal.

   
   Its specifick gravity is about 2.888.

James Freeman Dana and Samuel L. Dana. “Argillaceous Slate,” from Outlines of the Mineralogy and Geology of Boston and its Vicinity, with a Geological Map (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1818), p. 57.

Supplementum

• Ellen Wayland-Smith and Marcia Bjornerud, “The Languages and Lessons of Stone: A Conversation with Author and Geologist Marcia Bjornerud,” Orion Magazine (August 13, 2024).

• George Ehrenfried, “This Old Land of Cambridge,” adapted from a lecture presented at the Mount Auburn Branch of the Cambridge Public Library (April 1991).

• Patrick J. Barosh and David Woodhouse, “Geology of the Boston Basin,” Civil Engineering Practice (2011/2012): 100-236.

  

Each collection focuses on a single species of plant or animal—or a specific type of cloud, rock, landform, etc.—that is more or less relevant to the current season. I collect the texts and images primarily from digitized print sources that are in the public domain (i.e., out of copyright), occasionally supplementing these with contemporary media, art, and scholarship.

Both the name and format of Lectio Terra are loosely inspired by the Christian devotional practice of lectio divina (“divine reading”), in which selected scriptures are slowly read and contemplated. The noun lectio is also related to the form of the lectionary: a book, list, or collection of readings intended for a specific day or occasion.

Adapting these practices to natural phenomena and cultural or scientific texts is meant to encourage similar patterns of attention, reflection, and response, in which we move between past and present, personal and universal, physical and spiritual, while remaining tethered to the present moment. By also including a barrage of hyperlinks and supplemental materials in each post, the project emphasizes the mediated abundance of our relationship to nature and draws our cultural record into the moment of observing and encountering the world.

For each weekly set of readings/images, a headnote provides a mix of cultural and historical context, personal anecdotes, and taxonomical details. Of course, naming nature—assigning words to other things and beings—has a complicated history involving both creativity and domination. Diving into taxonomical information is not meant to authoritatively define the species at hand but to show how nature and culture, experience and knowledge are tangled. Human ideas, feelings, and stories depend on the material world even as they shape and change it.

Headnote

If there’s a plant that reminds me of God, it’s probably moss. Indeed, the plant’s biology is as ornate and rarefied as any systematic theology. Ubiquitous and abundant but amorphously changing, obvious but mysterious, perennially surprising and yet easy to take for granted, expanding or contracting as it slowly transforms its surroundings—modest moss can be as soft as the tender, mighty mullein, but its diminutive, hair-like roots, called rhizoids, work over time to accomplish feats of erosion that would be impossible for other plants. Moss is slow green fire, breathing air, water, and minerals into its pseudoparts; and permitting a multitude of traditional and experimental applications, from bedding, wound-dressing, and whiskey-making to biofuels and pharmaceuticals. For example, because of their nearly immediate interchange with the atmosphere, these subtle sculptors also function as bioindicators in both wild and human-developed landscapes, reflecting the quality of the air and capable of detecting even microplastics and trace elements of heavy metals.

The full-spectrum greens of the mosses embody the viriditas (“greening power” or “greening life-force”) that medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen identified as God’s vital presence suffusing earth, soul, and cosmos. In her dynamic elemental visions, consuming-illuminating fire and blowing-atmospheric wind converge to draw moisture into dry soils, bodies, and souls, bringing forth plants and fruits, growth and strength, virtuous acts of faith and hymns of praise. Although May and its first day are conventionally a time of flowers—the Roman festival of Floralia, the circling garlands and symbols of the maypole, and the month of Floréal on the French Revolutionary calendar—for me this is a month of mosses. Look to the decaying ground and the rocky crevices for a soft brush with the Creator.

The Hypnum genus, classified in the Hypnales order of “leafy” or “feather” mosses, is known for its thick, carpet-like growth and vivid green, yellow, or brown colors. These branching, mat- and tuft-forming species are pleurocarpous (pleura, “side,” plus karpos, “fruit”), in contrast to upright, capsule-bearing acrocarpous varieties. The Hypnum genus includes an undetermined number of species (in the range of hundreds), but all are part of the 11,000+ “true mosses” in the class Bryopsida. This class excludes several hundred varieties of moss (e.g., peat and granite mosses), which have various distinct characteristics, as well as outright imposters such as Spanish moss (related to the pineapple) and Irish moss (a seaweed). Along with liverworts (Hepaticopsida) and hornworts (Anthocerotophyta). all mosses are bryophytes in the Bryophyta division. These non-vascular, moisture-dependent plants lack true roots, stems, and leaves but are crucial for soil development and water retention. And the Victorians sure did love to press them under magnifying glasses.

Readings

1. How could any creation of Mine be void and useless? For every creature that lives (even those without the powers of reason or sensation) has two useful properties within itself, and one that perishes. The two useful ones are its juiciness or sap and its green foliage, but the other part withers in its dryness. The human being also has two components, that is, the soul and the body— the soul in virtues, the body in action— but it also knows evil, which is arid like the part that perishes.

Hildegard of Bingen, “334. Letter to Secular People” (circa 1153), Letters of Hildegard of Bingen: Volume 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 136.

2. Why is our conceptualization of time, drawing on metaphysical order and stability, ineffectual when it comes to the time of moss? First, as we have seen, the relative terms young and old, before and after, are inapplicable there where a linear chronology breaks down. Second, the paradigm of energy gradually dissipating in the measure of distancing from an energetically rich beginning no longer works when faced with moss: diminished vitality coincides with the exuberance of mossy vegetal life, one that infinitely mirrors and is mirrored in “the architecture of the forest.” Third, though “primitive,” moss encompasses at least fourteen thousand species and includes virtually all methods of plant reproduction (be they sexual or asexual) and growth, reliant on mutual interactions with the boundary layer or the microclimate that surrounds each leaf and growing point of every plant. Hence, already, in the nineteenth century, a relevant entry in The Edinburgh Encyclopedia stated: “He who could examine the nutrition, the growth, the regular confirmation, the provision made for the continuation of the species…of even the minutest Phascum [mosses], without perceiving in them proofs of intelligence, power, and goodness, would probably receive no more conviction from the sublimest truths that astronomy can unfold.” Finally, moss grinds rocks to stand and builds up soil for future plant growth; it performs simultaneously the tasks of analysis and synthesis, complicating the (mythical) image of time as a universal destroyer, the merciless devourer of all without exception.

Michal Marder and Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), p. 76.

3. Along with lichens, bryophytes are often the first actors in primary succession: the ecological process of weathering bare rock into soils that can sustain more complex forms of life. This can occur after a volcanic eruption or the retreat of a glacier; here in New England, mosses and lichens are still waging a battle against the bare rock of our highest peaks. Once established, bryophytes modify their environment through cation exchange. In this process, a bryophyte releases a proton (H+) from its cell walls into the surrounding environment, which in turn displaces positively charged ions (cations) such as calcium (Ca²⁺), magnesium (Mg²⁺), and potassium (K⁺) from nearby soil or rock particles. The bryophyte then absorbs these essential nutrients into its tissues.

“Mosses of Maine: A Brief Guide,” Oxford County CTS (October 15, 2025).

Supplementum

• “O Nobilissima Viriditas,” Written by Hildegard von Bingen, composed/arranged by Bryce Dressner, featuring Barbara Hannigan, David Chalmin, and Katia Labèque, and Marielle Labèque. Electric Fields (Alpha Classics, 2025).

• Text of “O Nobilissima Viriditas,” International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies (April 21, 2017).

• Bruce McCune and Kristen Whitbeck, “Living in the Land of Mosses,” Pacific Northwest Pest Management Handbooks (March 2023).

• Ellen McHale, “7 Interesting Things About Mosses,” Kew Royal Botanic Gardens (May 23, 2020).

• The Bryophyte Nomenclator. ed. John C. Brinda and John J. Atwood (April 2026).

This one’s a day late; I had to catch up on my day job and be an insomniac for a couple nights. Do you have any suggested species or sources for me to include in future dispatches? Leave a comment on Substack or send me an email.

Headnote

The wooly, silver-green leaves were hard to miss in my community garden plot last spring. It’s the sort of plant you’ve seen before but never noticed (cf. “plant blindness”). I decided to let it continue growing, wildly and/or weedily, alongside the plants I had intentionally planted. Eventually, I learned that it was a mullein, likely “common” or “great” mullein, known for centuries as a respiratory support, fish poison, shoe insole, and candle. Plants are full of surprises. But since their introduction to North America up to 400 years ago, mulleins also have been a nuisance for farmers and often treated as an invasive weed. Plants are double-edged swords. Soft shelter or overpowering intruder, symbol of resilience and rage, a cure but also a poison, mullein survives our weeding and may, in the long run, survive us. Its seeds can lie dormant in soil for more than 100 years, until disturbed into the light.

Great mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is one of several hundred flowering species in the Verbascum genus, which itself is in the figwort (Scrophulariaceae) family. This scientific name potentially derives from barbascum (Latin for “bearded”) and Thapsos, the ancient Tunisian city. But the plant’s plethora of enticing nicknames and vernacular titles includes flannel leaf, velvet dock, lady’s candle, hag’s taper, Jupiter’s staff, hare’s beard, donkey’s ear, beggar’s blanket, and—much to my eight-year-old’s delight—cowboy toilet paper. Clearly, its stellate trichomes (star-shaped leaf hairs) and tower-like stem have not gone unnoticed. The biennial plant produces flat rosettes in its first year, followed in year two by a tall spike that flowers irregularly, with each blossom along the spike opening for one day. The spikes remain upright through winter, providing seed and perch or shelter for birds. It is a ruderal species that colonizes fire-scarred or logged landscapes, roadsides and construction sites, and so on. I hope it doesn’t completely overrun my garden.

Readings

1. One of my favorite facts about mullein is that it can produce hundreds of seeds—and these seeds can lay dormant for decades. I think mullein is clever, and it knows that rage is a conduit. Rage is almost like fire: fire is a reaction. It has to have fuel; it has to have combustion. Fire needs other components to exist. Mullein is like that. The plant produces all of these seeds, but those seeds know, Oh, I’m not in safe ground. Or, I’m not in a good area where I can germinate and grow. I’m going to wait and bide my time.
   
   Going back to the idea of the Angry Black Woman trope, I grew up going to a predominantly white school. When I did anything there, I was received as angry or full of attitude or sassy. I was constantly trying to prove otherwise—and that became so exhausting. I am okay now. I’m at a place where I’m OK with saying, Hell yeah, I’m angry. Have you seen what’s going on? Why are you not angry?
   
   Everybody has their own emotions and their own way of processing them. For me, anger is the first emotion that emerges, and then I have to poke behind the anger to see what the real emotion is feeding the anger.
   
   Anger and grief are very much intertwined for me. I read about the colonial decimation of bison, which facilitated Indigenous genocide in the Great Plains, or I read about a Chinese mining company poisoning a river in Zambia, and I get angry. I get so sad because I’m like, It does not have to be this way. It makes my blood boil seeing what we do to the earth and what we do to each other.
   
   Colonial powers, Western powers do not treat the earth like a living being; we treat it as something to extract things from. A lot of times that’s how Black people are treated by an oftentimes apathetic population. It’s like, What can we extract from Black people, whether that be labor or culture or inventiveness? That extraction drains us and makes us angry and bitter. If we can have more candid conversations about anger and the way anger shows up in our lives, we would all be better for it.
   
   Within the canon of ecocriticism and environmental writing, there’s so much talk about sublime beauty and romanticism. Lots of this removes humans from nature, as if the only way nature can be beautiful is without human influence. Amid climate change, we’re seeing more dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives. I think these perspectives are two sides of the same coin: what does it say when the only way we can think of human engagement with nature is nature punishing us, or us being completely separate from nature? Anger has a place in all of that storytelling.

Ashia Ajani, with Amirio Freeman, “Ashia Ajani Mulls Over Mullein,” PLANTCRAFT (May 5, 2025).

2. I had an Inflammation of the Bronchial Tube very bad and the phlegm nearly choked me to death. A young man who knows these herbs came to my house and said to me: “If I only knew where there was some Mullein, I could help.” I didn’t know where to get it , and he left , but he came back and this is what he did: Heated the Mullein Leaves in warm vinegar, then put on my neck and chest and later made me drink a cup or two of Peppermint Tea and it helped me very much.
   
   Writes Mrs. F. N., Mascoutah, Ill.
   
   Editor’s Note - A knowledge of the medicinal value of herbs will save you many dollars, and much suffering. Our 400-page Herbalist Book describes all American medicinal roots and herbs. It contains color plates and photographic reproductions of hundreds of plants. Price only 25c.

The Old Herb Doctor: His Secrets and Treatments (Hammond, Indiana: Hammond Book Company, 1941), p. 35.

3. Mullein [wullena] is warm and dry and somewhat cold. Let whoever has a weak and sad heart, cook mullein with meat, fish, or pastry, but without any other herbs, and eat this often; the person’s heart will be strengthened and made happy. Let whoever has a hoarse voice or a sore throat which causes pain in the chest cook mullein and an equal amount of fennel in good wine, strain it through a piece of cloth, and then drink this often. The person’s voice will return and the chest will be healed.

Hildegard von Bingen, from Physica (c. 1150), Hildegard’s Healing Plants: From Her Medieval Classic Physica, trans. Bruce W. Hozeski (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 115-116.

Supplementum

• Ashia Ajani, with Amirio Freeman. “Ashia Ajani Mulls Over Mullein,” PLANTCRAFT (May 5, 2025).

• “Common Mullein.—V. Thapsus,” from Mrs. William Starr Dana [Frances Theodora Parsons], A Selection of Fifty Plates from “How to Know the Wild Flowers” (New York: C. Scribners’ Sons, 1894), p. 151.

• County-level U.S. distribution of common mullein. Early Detection & Distribution Mapping System (EDDMapS). The University of Georgia - Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health.

• Global distribution of common mullein. . The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Headnote

Few creatures are more storied than the rabbit and its cousin, the hare. Their manifestations extend across the globe, ranging from cosmology and folklore (Nanabozho and Br’er Rabbit) into transatlantic children’s literature (Lewis Carroll’s “White Rabbit,” Peter Rabbit, and Peter Cottontail), and onward to twentieth-century cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Roger Rabbit) and cinematic riddles (the eponymous Harvey and Donnie Darko’s Frank)—let’s not get into the other versions of bunnies in American pop culture. Across their many forms, these leporine figures embody a variety of traits and entities: transformation and trick; the moon and its goddess, or perhaps the underworld; fertile abundance or skittish cowardice—unless you are Monty Python and the medieval symbolism that inspired those British flapdoddlers. The symbols are appropriately numerous for the famously procreative creature.

My kids have excitedly spotted several individual rabbits in our urban neighborhood this spring (no fluffles yet), including one parent-shaped Easter bunny. I like to think the kids and the rabbits share a special connection, as both introduce a mix of docile dependence and feral wildness into the adult- and concrete-dominated cityscape. Remembering these tender wildlife sightings, or cross-identifications, it is a bit bewildering to dig up the wealth of rabbit-related scientific imagery and taxonomical data available in the public domain. So much energy and precision expended, much of it at public expense (back when that happened), to see and to understand. Yet this perspective is not neutral. As much as it reflects the wonders of science and of dedicating research for the public good, rather than corporate intellectual property, it also demonstrates how long-lasting, how granular was the American colonial project of mapping and quantifying the continent’s natural resources for the purposes of controlling and potentially extracting value from them. Millions upon millions of rabbits killed, initially for food and fur, and later for pest control. No longer our kin, and no longer a source of sustenance or myth, the rabbit lives on at the edges of our gardens and digital media, a tender blessing, a possible threat—yes, still a trickster.

The Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus, formerly known as Lepus sylvaticus) is the most common rabbit throughout New England and one of the most frequently found mammals across the continent. The species includes as many as 25 subspecies, varying primarily by region. In the northeast, the Eastern Cottontail has outcompeted the native New England Cottontail (Sylvilagus transitionus), which has smaller eyes, darker fur, slightly shorter ears with black edging, and often a black spot between its ears. The Eastern Cottontail is more versatile and adaptable than its New England kin, which relies on dense underbrush—maybe even briar patches—for protection. It roams into forest clearings, open meadows, and even suburban yards, relying instead on electric explosions of energy to leap away from harm. Rabbits and hares are both in the order Lagomorpha, along with the exceedingly adorable pika (genus Ochotona) and the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), from which contemporary domestic rabbits descend.

Readings

1. … Well, de ‘gator was a pretty white varmint wid coal black eyes. He useter swim in de water, but he never did bog up in de mud lak he do now. When he come out de water he useter lay up on de clean grass so he wouldn’t dirty hisself all up.
   
   So one day he was layin’ up on de grass in a marsh sunnin’ hisself and sleepin’ when Brer Rabbit come bustin’ cross de marsh and run right over Brer ‘Gator before he stopped. Brer ‘Gator woke up and seen who it was trompin’ all over him and trackin’ up his pretty white hide. So he seen Brer Rabbit, so he ast him, “Brer Rabbit, what you mean by runnin’ all cross me and messin’ up my clothes lak dis?”

   
   Brer Rabbit was up behind a clump of bushes peerin’ out to see what was after him. So he tole de ‘gator, says: “Ah ain’t got time to see what Ah’m runnin’ over nor under. Ah got trouble behind me.”
   
   ‘Gator ast, “Whut is trouble. Ah ain’t never heard tell of dat befo’.”
   
   Brer Rabbit says, “You ain’t never heard tell of trouble?”
   
   Brer ‘Gator tole him, “No.”
   
   Rabbit says: “All right, you jus’ stay right where you at and Ah’ll show you whut trouble is.”
   
   He peered ‘round to see if de coast was clear and loped off, and Brer ‘Gator washed Brer Rabbit’s foot tracks off his hide and went on back to sleep agin.
   
   Brer Rabbit went on off and lit him a li’dard knot1 and come on back. He sat dat marsh afire on every side. All around Brer ‘Gator de fire was burnin’ in flames of fire. De ‘gator woke up and pitched out to run, but every which a way he run de fire met him.
   
   He seen Brer Rabbit sittin’ up on de high ground jus’ killin’ hisself laughin’. So he hollered and ast him:
   
   “Brer Rabbit, whut’s all dis goin’ on?”
   
   “Dat’s trouble. Brer ‘Gator, dat’s trouble youse in.”
   
   De ‘gator run from side to side, round and round. Way after while he broke thru and hit de water “ker ploogum!” He got all cooled off but he had done got smoked all up befo’ he got to de water, and his eyes is all red from de smoke. And dat’s how come a ‘gator is black today—cause de rabbit took advantage of him lak dat.

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), pp. 106-107.

2. WINTER DENS
   In cold winter, the Cottontail is seldom found in a form or bed, unless it be very well sheltered. She much prefers a hole under a stone pile, a hollow log or tree, at such times. She uses these for more than mere snoozing places, as we shall see. Indeed, she would not be true to rodent tradition if she did not at some time assume the deathlike torpor that may be called a “cold sleep.” A driving storm sets in. Molly is ensconced under a thicket of briers and fern in one of her best forms, one most nearly weatherproof. The snow heaps up, shutting her into a sort of crystal-white cavern. Deeper and deeper piles the snow. Then the temperature falls, so that, though protected, she is numbed into a sort of frozen sleep. The raging of the storm outside kills every desire to venture forth. So long as the blizzard lasts, she rests, cold but not unhappy; a little hungry, perhaps, but not frozen—only drowsy—so drowsy that the easiest thing is to “lay low” and wait for better days.
   […]
   TAMABILITY
   It is a curious fact in the history of wild things that many of the wildest become most completely tame when properly managed; and many of those that, in their native state, are half-tame, can never be made domesticated or docile. Thus, the superferal Elephant, Wild Horse, Wild Dog, Wild-cat, Mink, Antelope, falcon, wild duck, respond completely when taken young, become members of the family. But the half-tame Fox, Hyena, pheasant, Canada jay, wood duck, and Cottontail, have never yet been tamed. They may be taken young and brought up so they tolerate our dwellings and our company, but never do they become truly members of the household-that is, domesticated—never do they learn to come at call, and rejoice in our company; never do they elect to stay with us when given the choice of returning to their wildwood kindred.

Ernest Thompson Seton, Lives of Game Animals, Volume IV, Part II: Rodents, Etc. (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1929), p. 806, 807.

Supplementum

• Emily Zobel Marshall, “Beatrix Potter’s famous tales are rooted in stories told by enslaved Africans – but she was very quiet about their origins,” The Conversation (May 19, 2023).

• Joshua J. Mark, “Manabozho Tales,” World History Encyclopedia (February 12, 2025).

• Anne C., “Rabbits in Myth and Legend,” shelftalk: The Seattle Public Library Blog (October 6, 2009).

• Zora Neale Hurston, “The Eatonville Anthology,” The Messenger 13.11 (November 1926): 332.

• J.A. Allen, Monographs of North American Rodentia. No. 2.—Leporidae, United States Geological Survey of the Territories (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1877).

HEADNOTE

What IS existing?

As German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)1 noted, this quintessentially philosophical question might seem “primitive” compared to the specificities of modern science as it defines, dissects, quantifies, calculates, and hypothesizes all things based on empirical observations. Today, we might reframe the question as a riddle about neurons and “consciousness”: does the brain simply generate mental experience (materialism) or somehow channel a universal mind-spirit (idealism)?

But for Heidegger, the question of existence was fundamental, and it required a return to ancient ideas, including the pro-Socratic Greek term Physis, or Phusis, derived from the verb phyo (“to bring forth”), and often translated as “nature,” in contrast to Nomos (“law, custom, or convention”). From Physis, we get “physics” as the science of matter and energy. Instead of turning to theorems or mathematical equations, though, Heidegger used this term to refer to our pre-reflective experiences of the world: what we see, feel, touch, or otherwise know before the application of mental interpretations and rational concepts. By postponing cognitive reflection, he attempted to distinguish “beings as such” (the existence of particular cats, people, and objects, which we encounter in physics and other of the natural sciences) from “Being itself” (the presence or revelation of existence in general, as discernible and meaningful to the philosophical tradition of metaphysics). This substratum of existence is not a static substance or representational framework, as modern philosophers sometimes proposed; it is a dynamic event, an unfolding process, through and within which particular beings come to exist or can be encountered as existing. Human “being,” indeed.

Here we’ve entered the realm of strange thoughts, like when we remember that the human body has a resonant frequency, that atoms are quantum clouds of delocalized matter, and that there is a faint glow of ancient radiation saturating the entire observable universe.

This is also the realm of FERNS: primordial (moreso exponentially than even the ancient crocus), flowerless but spore-bearing, tropical-loving and cold-tolerant, sun-optional, sometimes edible, and chaotic to the bone genome. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the unfurling fronds of the tree-like silver fern, or ponga (Cyathea dealbata), embody koru (“loop” or “coil”), a visual leitmotif in art/design representing the emergence of life, the spiral from origin to endless future, and symbolizing the Māori genealogical concept of Whakapapa. Closer to my home, in New England and across the Northern Hemisphere, the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) is one of several species whose slow-rocketing croziers, or fiddleheads, mark the return of spring and the persistence of biological life. Both a being as such and a symbol of existence itself, the fern is older, gentler, queerer—and tastier—even than Heidegger’s metaphysics.

The Matteuccia genus is named after Italian physicist Carlo Matteucci (1800–1868), and the struthiopteris species is from the Greek strouthós, “bird,” plus pteron, “wing” or “feather.” The ostrich fern belongs to the small family Onocleaceae, which contains only five species worldwide and is characterized by dimorphism, or the production of two distinct types of frond: tall sterile ones that carry on photosynthesis and give the plant its plumage-like shape, and smaller modified fronds that hold spore-bearing structures through the winter. The former are what can be cooked and eaten. To distinguish the ostrich fern from potentially dangerous lookalikes—particularly the cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) and the interrupted fern (Osmunda claytoniana), both of which may cause illness if eaten raw—look for the distinctive deep groove, like a small celery stalk’s channel, running along the inside of the stem. Only the ostrich fern has it.

READINGS

1. In the age of the first and definitive unfolding of Western philosophy among the Greeks, when questioning about beings as such and as a whole received its true inception, beings were called phusis. This fundamental Greek word for beings is usually translated as “nature.” We use the Latin translation natura, which really means “to be born,” “birth.” But with this Latin translation, the originary content of the Greek word phusis is already thrust aside, the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek work is destroyed….
   
   Now what does the word phusis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance—in short, the emerging-abiding sway. According to the dictionary, phuein means to grow, to make grow. But what does growing mean? Does it just mean to increase by acquiring bulk, to become more numerous and bigger?

   Phusis as emergence can be experienced everywhere: for example, in celestial processes (the rising of the sun), in the surging of the sea, in the growth of plants, in the coming forth of animals and human beings from the womb. But phusis, the emerging sway, is not synonymous with these processes, which we still today count as part of “nature.” This emerging and standing-out-in-itself-from-itself may not be taking as just one process among other that we observe in beings. Phusis is Being itself, by virtue of which beings become and remain observable.
   
   It was not in natural processes that the Greeks first experienced what phusis is, but the other way around: on the basis of a fundamental experience of Being in poetry and thought, what they had to call phusis disclosed itself to them. Only on the basis of this disclosure could they then take a look at nature in the narrower sense. Thus phusis originally meant both heaven and earth, both the stone and the plant, both the animal and the human, and human history as the work of humans and gods; and finally and first of all, it means the gods who themselves stand under destiny. Phusis means the emerging sway, and the enduring over which it thoroughly holds sway. This emerging, abiding sway includes both “becoming” and “Being” in the narrower sense of fixed continuity. Phusis is the event of standing forth, arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000 [1935]), pp. 14–16.

2. The young leaf grows much more rapidly than the stem, and soon projects beyond it. The multiplication of the cells being greater on the lower side, the leaf begins to curve upward. The cells of the leaf-stalk now elongate rapidly, and after the embryo has broken through the overlying tissue of the prothallium, the leaf pushes up between the lobes of the prothallium, appearing above its surface (Pl. 6, fig. 5).

   
   The apical cell of the stem divides much more slowly, and follows nearly the same plan at first. The segments later divide somewhat differently, the first division wall of the segment being a radial one, and dividing the segment into two nearly equal cells. The stem is very short at the time the embryo breaks through the prothallium, but the apex is more decidedly conical than is the case in the mature plant.
   

   The apical cell of the foot soon becomes obliterated by a process entirely similar to that already described, but the cells continue to multiply rapidly with no regular order. By means of the foot, which when complete is large and rounded in shape, the embryo is kept in close connection with the prothallium, and by means of it the embryo is nourished until the first leaf and root are developed.

Douglas Houghton Campbell, The Development of the Ostrich Fern (Boston: Society of Natural History, April 1887), p. 29.

SUPPLEMENTUM

• Mike Houlahan, “The Koru - Arguably the Best-Known Maori Symbol,” Otaga Daily Times (December 27, 2018).

• Gordon Walters, Maho (1973); cf. Robert Leonard, “Gordon Walters: Form Becomes Sign,” Art and Australia 44.2 (2006).

• Matthew Sharpe, “Heidegger in ruins? Grappling with an anti‑semitic philosopher and his troubling rebirth today,” The Conversation (April 11, 2023).

• Stacia Brezinski, “Fiddlehead, Ostrich, and Cinnamon: All About Ferns!,” from Maine Audobon (May 6, 2025).

• Alan Bergo, “Fiddlehead Ferns: Identifying, Harvesting and Cooking,” Forager | Chef (March 14, 2023).

Headnote

The crocuses likely have already come and gone. They can return each spring almost too early, before the snow melts, before the robins return, before the atmosphere warms (let alone the soil). Here in my urban neighborhood, the Dutch crocus (Crocus vernus) blooms in tandem with the snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) and just prior to the daffodils (Narcissus pseudonarcissus). These corm-based geophytes, which require 10 to 15 weeks of cold to biochemically shift their apical meristem, or growing point, from leaf- to flower-production, have become such a seasonal marker for me that I assumed they must be native to this landscape. And maybe they are—now. But their journey to here crosses several continents and centuries, through the studios of Dutch painters and the apothecaries brewing saffron concoctions to treat the Black death, across the slopes of the Alps and the diplomatic circuits of Holy Roman ambassadors, originating primarily from the grassy hillsides of Anatolia, the species’ primary center of diversity.

These are ancient origins. John Milton pictured the crocus embroidering the ground of Eden, “more colour’d than with stone / Of costliest emblem,” and the other poets, of course, love the flower’s evocative timing and physical form. Ovid and other Greeks recorded a more tragic tale about Crocus’ place within the empire of flowers. Though long associated with the cradle(s) of civilization, the saffron crocus (Crocus sativus), source of the world’s most expensive spice, now is being cultivated across New England, all the way out to Provincetown.

The Crocus genus is part of the trimerous iris family (Iridaceae) but is distinct from the true Iris genus. The Dutch, or spring, Vernus species is one of several that bloom in spring, coming after the precocious tommasinianus (woodland) and chrysanthus (snow), alongside flavus (yellow), and long before the autumn group that includes sativus (saffron) and the beautiful but toxic crocus imposters of family Colchicaceae. Of particular note: the saffron crocus is a mutant or hybrid that contains three sets of chromosomes and is therefore sterile; it has survived as a clone for more than 3500 years through the division and propagation of corms by human hands, and its thread-like stigmas are also still harvested by hand, as they were in Minoan civilization.

Readings

1. C. vernus is one of the most widely extended Croci, and of the easiest culture, producing seeds abundantly, which, as neither the birds nor the mice seem to eat them, become almost a nuisance from the multitude of self-sown seedlings, which come up spontaneously, and intrude where they are not wanted. It is the Crocus of the Alps, but its flower is small there, promiscuously purple and white or whitish, generally with the throat purple on the outside, but always white and hairy within. It reaches Cevennes; and I am told it is to be found, though rare, on the Pyrenees. Brotero states it to be found in the north of Portugal, but his plant is perhaps C. Carpetanus. It extends, with white acute flowers, into Carinthia, and is found white, with very blunt obovate flowers, on the Bavarians Alps, sometimes assuming a blush of purple. I believe it is only found in particular spots on the Pyrenees, affecting the oolite or Jurassic limestone. On the Alps it reaches above 5000 feet of altitude. I have seen it both white and purple from the Tyrol. The finer purple Neapolitan variety inhabits the loftiest mountains of Calabria and Lucania, not descending lower than 5000 feet. On Monte Pollino it flowers as late as June and July, reaching an elevation of 6000 feet. On the Wengern Alp its flowers actually pierce the remaining snow in June.

William Herbert, A History of the Species of Crocus, ed. John Lindley (London, England: William Clowes and Sons, [1847]), pp. 25-26.

2. In his installation Crocus sativus, fleur du bonheur, Guillaume Barth pays homage to the saffron flower by capturing the moment of its birth. The artist invented a rotating plate system for time-lapse photography so as to reveal the rotating movement of the flower, like the dance of the dervishes for which it is a metaphor. It opens under the full moon and blooms for 24 hours, which is the duration of its life. A video projects this actual size in the middle of a levitating circle with a diameter of four metres. Visitors are invited to stand on a rug whose motif recalls the spiralling form of the petals. There they hear a melody inspired by the root sounds of Sufi tradition, composed by Mirtohid Radfar. The three phases in this music sing the rising of the saffron flower from its bulb, the exaltation of its opening, and then a gentle settling. It sets forth the present moment. There are three circles: the rotating movement of the flower, the circle of the carpet and, above all, the undulating field of the music spinning around us and within us. This multicultural work offers a space of resilience. Known since time immemorial, saffron is a powerful natural anxiolytic associated with joy, luck and regeneration.

Gallery text from Guillaume Barth, Crocus sativus, fleur du bonheur (Studio National des Arts Contemporains du Fresnoy, 2021).

Supplementum

• Anna Trakoli, “Minoan Art, The ‘Saffron Gatherers’, c. 1650 BC,” Occupational Medicine 71.3 (April 2021): 124–126.

• Everett Merill Hill, The Story the Crocus Told (Spokane, Washington: The Uplook Publishing Company, 1909).

• Janis Ruksans, Crocuses: A Complete Guide to the Genus (Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 2011).

Headnote

If you didn’t know that The International Cloud Atlas exists, then you do now.

First published in 1896 by the International Meteorological Society in France, this trilingual edition codified nearly a century’s worth of taxonomic attention by certain Western European intellectuals, or, shall we say, lay-abouts. Apart from folkloric and indigenous systems of cloud-reading, the scientific classification of cloud formations began right around 1800, when Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Luke Howard independently developed lexicons in French and English, respectively. Lamarck’s evocative French phrases (i.e., en balayeurs, or broom-like) could not compete with Howard’s Latinate constructions, which won the endorsement of none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote a poem mythologizing the English cloud-gazer. By the time the first Atlas was published, Howard’s romantic pastime had become a gentlemanly institution, housed in national bureaus and eventually international organizations; the project went through many print editions over the next 120 years, before going digital in 2017.

Have I mentioned that springtime can be a polarized, multitudinous season? The mornings are chilled, and the afternoons warm (or vice versa). The ice thaws and leaves behind a trash-filled swamp on the sidewalk. Preemptive acts of undeclared war roil the globe. Rolling rain clouds suffocate the cold lower atmosphere—evoking the “Sad destiny of the troubled world!,” in Goethe’s telling—even as they bring the rain needed to grow new life and, perhaps, discover spiritual transcendence. Cloud-reading is a fitting activity for such a season, with its paradoxical fusion of attention and lethargy, strain and relaxation, precision and imagination. It might reveal to us not only the strange contours of the sky but “the sheer volume of emotions” drifting behind our eyes.

The genus Nimbostratus was first introduced in the 1930 edition of the Atlas because “the definition of nimbus in the Atlas of 1910 led to some confusion” (p. 14, n. 1)—scandalous, I know!1 Due to the formation’s uniform and featureless character, it is not conventionally divided into species. However, the supplementary feature praecipitatio can be appended to the genus when it produces continuous precipitation that reaches the ground (in contrast to virga, referring to precipitation that evaporates mid-air).

Readings

1. Nimbus
   Now downwards by the world’s attraction driven,
   That tends to earth, which had upris’n to heaven;
   Threatening in the mad thunder-cloud, as when
   Fierce legions clash, and vanish from the plain;
   Sad destiny of the troubled world! but see,
   The mist is now dispersing gloriously:
   And language fails us in its vain endeavour —
   The spirit mounts above, and lives forever.

Goethe, from “In Honour of Mr. Howard” (c. 1820), trans. George Soane and Sir John Bowring, Gold’s London Magazine 4.19 (July 1821), 59-63.

2. It is possible, even likely, that you’d feel terror, heartbreak, and rage while looking at clouds, at the exact same time that you feel a self-annihilating love of this world. In fact, I would be surprised if, looking at clouds for the first time in a while, many people don’t start crying just from the sheer volume of emotions we can’t allow ourselves to fully feel about what’s happening. To me, it’s so important that that conduit stays open. A fiercely protected capacity for love is, in the end, how we stay alive against the encroachments of cynicism and despair.

Jenny Odell, “What Does It Mean to Watch Clouds? What Can It Mean?” Jenny Odell’s Newsletter (July 4, 2025).

More

• Thea Applebaum Licht, “Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1865),” The Public Domain Review (Dec. 2, 2025).

• Maria Popova, “89 Clouds: A Poetic Celebration of Clouds and Everything They Mean” (The Marginalian, March 3, 2015). Rev. of Wendy Mark and Mark Strand, 89 Clouds (New York, New York: ACA Galleries, 1999).

• Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How An Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (2001; New York: Picador, 2002).

• Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (New York: Melville House, 2019) and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture (New York: Random House, 2023).

Headnote

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera), also known as canoe birch or American white birch, is a mid-sized deciduous tree native to northern North America. It can be found across the northern half of the continent. Paper birch sap begins flowing near the end of sugar maple season, when daytime temperatures reach above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and continues to run for only two to three weeks, approximately half as long as maple sap. Although black and yellow birch are more commonly used to produce birch beer, which pairs their sap with wintergreen oils distilled from their bark, paper birch is best for producing syrup or “birch water molasses,” as Cree and other indigenous communities have long done, due to the balanced flavor profile and relatively high sugar content of its sap.

The tree’s wonders go beyond the culinary, touching both art and science. Visually, birches in general are a perennial favorite of painters including Vincent Van Gogh, Gustav Klimt, and Georgia O’Keefe. And the actual bark of the paper birch, in particular, has provided the Anishinaabe with a medium for writing (as wiigwaasabak, a form of scroll), craft, and even transport. The tree’s visual interest and practical applications are due in large part to its high concentrations of betulin—the white, powdery, reflective, and water-resistant substance that gives the bark of the white birches its distinctive appearance. More than just a cosmetic surface, betulin is a bioactive triterpene and the primary natural source of betulinic acid, which scientists are studying for its anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-cancer, and other properties.

Betulin’s protective qualities make the paper birch a sort of superhero tree, allowing it to serve as a ruderal, or early successional species. It arrives first in disturbed and vulnerable landscapes, growing quickly to create a habitat for other trees. Yet the paper birch is also relatively fragile and short-lived, vulnerable to a variety of pests and diseases—and young birch-swingers—with a shorter lifespan than other trees (roughly 80 to 140 years, or shorter in warmer, more humid climates). In the succession of a forest, larger and more durable trees take root under the paper birch and eventually surpass it, outcompeting it for both sunlight and groundwater. The paper birch is “a temporary type of forest,” as Pinchot writes; it soon disappears from the shade it made possible. In the meantime, it grows rapidly, exfoliating bark in horizontal strips as its trunk expands, like a snake shedding its skin.

Readings

1. Paper birch is an important tree in the Northeast, both for economic and for silvicultural reasons. Its total annual cut is not large in comparison with that of many other species, but it is an important factor in certain wood-working industries. It is used practically to the exclusion of other woods in the manufacture of spools, shoe pegs, shoe shanks, and very largely in the manufacture of toothpicks, dowels, bobbins, shuttles, and various toys and novelties. The fine-grained, even-textured wood is peculiarly adapted to these uses.

   After fires and clearings, paper birch, with aspen, is often the first species to occupy the ground. It takes possession of such areas very readily, restores forest conditions, and furnishes a valuable timber crop. At the same time, it is merely a temporary type of forest, and does not prevent the return of the type natural to the locality.

Gifford Pinchot, “Silvical Leaflets 38: Paper Birch” United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (October 29, 1908).

2. I’d like to get away from earth awhile

   And then come back to it and begin over.

   May no fate willfully misunderstand me

   And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

   Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

   I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

   I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

   And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

   Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

   But dipped its top and set me down again.

   That would be good both going and coming back.

   One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Robert Frost, “Birches,” Atlantic Monthly (August 1915). Rpt. Robert Frost, Mountain Interval (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), pp. 29-30.

More

• Halfmoon Woman (Pat Bruderer), “How Indigenous Artists Are Reinvigorating the Art of Birch Biting” (October 22, 2025).

• Studio at Ruderal, “Ruderal Aesthetics” (June 20, 2022).

• Hardeep Singh Tuli et al. “Anti-Inflammatory and Anticancer Properties of Birch Bark-Derived Betulin: Recent Developments.” Plants 10.12 (Basel, Switzerland; Dec. 2021): 2663.