The Curious Naturalist: Nature's Everyday Mysteries by Sy Montgomery

Author:Sy Montgomery [Montgomery, Sy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, Essays
ISBN: 9781608934348
Google: OOdXBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Down East Books
Published: 1991-01-01T21:42:26+00:00

Pods

Blueprints for Immortality

Blinded by the blaze of autumn’s foliage, we often miss what is, from the plant’s point of view, its most spectacular efforts. After all, a plant’s crowning achievement is neither its youthful flowers nor autumn leaves, but its blueprints for immortality: fruit, pods, and seed heads. And long after autumn’s brilliant leaves have been raked away, these structures will continue to offer a harvest of strange and beautiful forms.

“Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness . . . to the fruits we eat,” Thoreau wrote in his journal in October of 1858, “and we are wont to forget that an immense harvest which we do not eat, hardly use at all, is annually ripened by nature . . . fruits which address our taste for beauty alone.”

Fruits, pods, and seeds offer stunning colors, fantastic shapes: some are shaped like Japanese lanterns; others look like space capsules from Mars; one tall, puffy pod looks like the fanciful common name for this lily: Turk’s cap.

You’ll find much of this wild harvest worthy of your favorite vase. “To me, the empty seed container—the pod—is another of nature’s works of art, as beautiful as the flower and as unique in its own form,” Wisconsin watercolorist Jane Embertson believes. So taken was she with this often-overlooked beauty that she wrote a guide to using berries, seeds, and pods in floral arrangements, entitled Pods: Wildflowers and Weeds in Their Final Beauty.

Asters’ fuzzy tufts hold little round clusters of silky seed heads, which can be used in arrangements as you would baby’s breath. Blue bead lily’s beautiful deep blue, round berries branch out in a starburst pattern from the top of the leafless stalk and make stunning accents. Common milkweed’s warty pods erupt with feathery parachutes of seeds, leaving soft, pale orange tongues clinging to silky yellow exteriors.

Many of these shapes and colors would grace gardens as well as wild places—but, notes Heather McCargo, New England Wild Flower Society’s plant propagator, “most gardeners hack everything back after it blooms.”

So, also, we miss many grasses’ graceful seed heads: wild oats, for instance, sport clusters of flattened chevrons on chartreuse stems; Gray’s sedge grows an astonishing mace-shaped seed head an inch across. “But we don’t see them,” says McCargo, “because we mow everything in sight.” (Fortunately, at the Society’s Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts, they don’t; so there, as well as in your local woods, fields, and swamps, you can see many of these pods, fruits, and nuts still on the plant.)

All of these structures are vehicles for seeds. A look at their shapes foretells their travels: milkweeds’ parachutes and maples’ whirligig pods are designed to ride the wind. Well-named sticktights and burdock burrs hitchhike on fur and clothing. Lantern or bladder-shaped pods of wetland species like water chestnut are designed to float like buoys on trips downstream. A few are entirely self-propelled: jewelweed’s seeds literally shoot off the plant if you brush against it. (Peel away the thin green pod for a tasty walnut­flavored field snack.

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