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ANATOMY OF A ROSE -- EXPLORING THE SECRET LIFE OF FLOWERS |
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EIGHT: Time WE ARE DESPERATE TO understand time. How can the past be over? Where is over? We distrust time, the way it bends when you are eight years old, the way it slows when you are skiing down a hill. We know this is our fault, our oddball consciousness. Time is objective. We are not. The clock ticks. Time waits for no one. Then a physicist explains: Time is not separate from or independent of space. Moreover, space-time is curved or warped by the distribution of mass and energy. Time runs more slowly near a massive body like the earth. Put a very accurate clock at the bottom of a tower and another one at the top. The clock at the bottom will show a slightly different, earlier time than the clock at the top. Take a pair of twins. Make one of them live in San Diego at sea level. Make the other live on a high mountain in Peru. The twin in Peru will age faster. Send one twin off in a spaceship traveling near the speed of light. Now things get complicated. When this twin returns, she will be younger than the one who stayed home. Time can be influenced. *** I AM PART OF A SUPPER CLUB that has lasted almost fifteen years, which seems a long time in this culture. Five couples meet every eight weeks. We each bring a dish from a selected cuisine, Chinese or Italian or Greek, and we all sit together for a few hours to eat enormous, delicious meals without our children, with a tablecloth, with wine. Perhaps we put a red rose in a vase. The couples change. In fifteen years, some have dropped out of the group, some have moved away, some have divorced. Many of us see each other only at this dinner party. Among the things we value is continuum. One night, before dessert, a couple received a phone call and announced suddenly that they had to go. Their cereus cactus was in bloom. It did not seem, at the time, a very good reason to leave a friendly group of people who had arranged with some difficulty this special occasion. We hid our annoyance, which we also filed, for future reference. The cereus cactus is a slender, grayish plant often hidden under shrubby trees like mesquite or creosote. The stem can be as small as half an inch in diameter and grow as long as six feet. It is a spiny, unprepossessing twig. Botanists delight in scorning this cactus as an ugly duckling, with "the cuddle appeal of a dead stick." Then, suppressing a smile, the botanists turn their backs. They turn around again. Giddily, gaily, they gesture with their hands. The cereus cactus has blossomed into a swan! Its beauty, always, is a surprise. Its beauty, always, is a fairy tale. The large, white flowers of the cereus cactus open at night into a silky, many-petaled star, with a musky, sweet smell. The star fills the palm of your hand, where it seems to glow in the darkness. On first seeing a patch of these flowers, one man believed that someone had turned on a dozen flashlights and left them in the desert, scattered under bushes, wasting batteries. One woman saw ghosts. The Spanish name for the cereus cactus, La reina de La noche, means "the queen of the night." Each flower blooms once, for a matter of hours. I have never seen a cereus cactus bloom. My friend, the woman who left the dinner party, says it reminds her of time-lapse photography, the way she could see the flower unfold, the way it moved like royalty down a long carpet, gracious, inexorable. Her husband, whom I questioned later at another party, used the word "amazing" three times in a sentence. Once I accosted her teenage son on the streets of Silver City. He also nodded and said, "Yeah."
Cereus Cactus My friend is a historian, director of the Silver City Museum. She tells me that in the 1870s, in this small mining town, people used to have cereus cactus parties. When their houseplant began to bloom, they would send out the news. Other people rushed over. Refreshments were served. Sometimes the event appeared in the local paper: "An Impromptu Soiree Enjoyed by All." My friend laments that the annual flowering of the cereus cactus no longer means much to her husband and son. "Come see!" she exclaims. But they have already seen. They do not need to see again. "Neat," her son will offer as a gift. She has begun calling up friends instead. Call me, I say. The flower of the cereus cactus is ephemeral. Most flowers are ephemeral. Their lives are brief. More than a few, like the queen of the night, live for only a day or an evening. In those hours, the silky blossoms of the cereus cactus must do everything they can to attract pollinators, night-flying insects like the white-lined sphinx moth, which come to drink the flower's nectar. La reina de La noche cannot self-fertilize. Nor is she gregarious. As few as five to ten cacti may grow in an acre of hot, dry, inhospitable desert, mutely surviving the sun, the wind, the cows. The queen compensates by being intense. Her fragrance is strong. Her beauty is legendary. She has only this night. Well, yes and no. The cereus cactus may have only a few flowers, each flower lasting only one night, with the entire season lasting as little as four nights, depending on moisture. But the cactus itself can live to be seventy-five years old. The long, spiny twig will keep blooming, summer after summer, waiting for the right white-lined sphinx moth. The queen in the fairy tale will sleep for years, while kingdoms fall and the prince hacks his way through a briar-filled woods. *** IT MAKES YOU THINK about our allotment of time. A clonal creosote can live to be twelve thousand years old. A redwood tree saw the Spanish missionaries. A human, a parrot, and a cereus cactus reach the Biblical age of three score and ten. A black bear may forage for thirty years. A dog may be your companion for fifteen. Mice rarely see their second birthday. Many insects don't last a month. No doubt, there are good reasons for each span of life, for the old age of a tortoise or the brief flare of a moth. From a plant's point of view, flowers are brief because flowers are so much work. Beauty is expensive to maintain, all that scent and color, all that waving in the wind. The materials of reproduction are also fragile. They must be constantly protected. In some climates, flowers have to think about weather. Winter is near. The rains are coming. It's getting hot. I'm getting dry. I'm losing all my petals. I'm freezing. I'm blowing away. Fertilization may be the sine qua non, but better sooner than later. Flowers that last a short time are often on a plant that blooms for much longer. In the morning glory, each individual flower opens and dies and is replaced overnight by another flower. The giant water lily blossoms until its pool is dry, but each extravagant lily lives for only two days. Some flowering plants themselves have a very short time to live. Many annual wildflowers must sprout, grow, flower, set seed, and die in a matter of weeks. They often self-fertilize. A few flowers manage to surprise us. Magnolia flowers live as many as twelve days. Orchids are among the longest-living flowers. Sheltered in a greenhouse, one orchid from Asia can stay fresh for nine months. Flowers that live a long time tend to look sturdy. Their petals feel thick and waxy with a coating that retains moisture. Their veins may be fibrous, forming an internal skeleton that helps support the flower's shape. Flowers pollinated by birds with sharp beaks or by beetles with chewing mouthparts need to be especially resilient, and these reinforcements add to the flower's life span. Flowers that have only a few pollinators may need to stay open long enough to get someone's attention. Flowers that practice deceit need enough time to attract one naive customer. Flowers that are firmly self-incompatible need additional time to cross-fertilize. *** THE CENTURY PLANT, OR AGAVE, grows in the same desert as the cereus cactus. Depending on the species, the century plant does not flower for its first five years or ten years or fifty years. Then, when you have completely lost interest, the spine-tipped leaf rosette sends out a flower stalk like a huge asparagus. This stalk may grow as much as a foot a day to as high as thirty feet. Branches extend horizontally from the top. Buds swell. Masses of yellow, tubular flowers open at night, positioned high like the lights on a baseball field, smelling strongly of musk and rotting meat. The century plant has produced a flare gun for migrating bats, hummingbirds, and other pollinators that descend in a rush, feed, and leave. Meanwhile, the rosette withers and dies. All its stores of food and water have gone into this growth of stalk and flower. The century plant does not live to be a century. It dies when it blooms, and it blooms once, staking everything on one shake of the dice. Other plants also begin to die as soon as they flower. Commercial bedding annuals like marigolds and zinnias eventually convert all their leafy stems into flowering stems. These annuals hold nothing back until every growing stem is a flower, unable to make a leaf or keep the plant alive. (Many wildflowers keep some stems underground in the form of bulbs, tubers, or rhizomes. Unlike the zinnia, the same plant will be there next spring.) Some plants do not die but do bloom only briefly, in a fireworks display. They are also high rollers and flashy dressers, ready to dance until they drop. A plant like the morning glory is more circumspect. It has a long flowering season that is carefully measured out: here, here, here, that's enough, stop, come back tomorrow. This works for pollinators that live in the area, are long-lived, and have good memories. In the U.S. Southwest, eight thousand years ago and for thousands of years after that, people tended fields of century plants, which they harvested for the inner heart and young flower stalk. The leaves provided fiber. The roots made soap. Many of these fields, bordered in stone, are still being found by archaeologists. The century plant is one of our first agricultural crops. It is a crop still. Just before blooming-- as the plant gathers sugar and nutrients, as it prepares for its first, final, and fatal puberty -- the heart of the agave can be cut out, roasted, and beaten into a pulp that ferments into liquor. Our tequila comes from commercial agave farms. Each year, over a million wild agave plants in Mexico and the United States are also cut open for bootleg mescal. We lift our glasses to the high roller. *** PHYSICISTS AGREE THAT time changes when you are a little tipsy. When you have had some wine, when your friends are nearby, you look at a flower, a wilting rose, and see how fast it is moving, close to the speed of light. You see how big it is, so near its death. You see how it curves the darkness of space, how it warps the flow of time. Time can be influenced. Time slows down when we look at a flower. Perhaps we age more slowly, too. It's worth a party. Send out the news. An impromptu soiree!
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