An Appreciation of Shapes

I'm a morphologist!

Why do you go to the woods, or the beach, or the garden? What draws you to that location, whatever it is? Is it the sunlight, or the peacefulness, or people-watching? As much as I adore watching people, I realized the interest that draws me to the woods is the shapes I find in nature.

I’m fascinated by nature’s structure: the exoskeleton of a crustacean, the Trapper Keeper pouch of a lady slipper, the atomic age summarized in one starflower. Sure, I love the colors too, the million shades of green, yellow and blue, but it’s really the shapes that grab my eye. I find knitting inspiration in tangled tree roots.

I bought some marigold yellow/orange ranunculus a few weeks ago. I loved them so much, I kept them until they were throwing petals all over the table like a flower girl at a wedding. I noticed that the green central stamen (?) grew as the flower died, until it formed a kind of penis, for lack of a better word. Which makes sense, in that I noticed some years ago that often a plant will flower when it’s distressed, as a last-ditch effort to pass its genes on.

I’m growing peas in the garden right now, which have fascinated me since I was a kid. Not just because they’re delicious—I eat them right in the garden, unzipping their shell and then scraping the peas off with my teeth—but because of their construction. What a neat little package! Jewelweed has a similar miraculous construction, except when you touch a ripe pod, it explodes and sends seeds everywhere. [FYI, if you’ve been told that jewelweed grows near poison ivy because it’s an antidote, that’s complete hogwash. It would take a water tower full of jewelweed to soothe the average case of poison ivy, and it’s mostly, maybe entirely, water anyway.]

But peas don’t do that (explode, I mean). So how do they spread their seeds? Most seeds travel via birds or critters. Critters pick up or eat things and drop them, complete or in poop, miles away. Peas are much too soft to survive a critters digestive system. The internet tells me that if we didn’t eat the peas, they would dry and harden until the pods split open and the seeds fell out. Then, I suppose they’d be picked up by critters.

I have pine pollen on my mind these days, because everything inside and outside my house is covered with it. Pinecones seem like a remarkably inefficient delivery system but clearly the system works. This year has been especially bad for pollen, which makes me think last year was a less successful year for seed dispersal. Or, again with the last-ditch effort, maybe the drought we’re in has distressed the pines to the point of panic.

I ran across this Virginia Woolf quote recently:

“…behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern, that we —I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare; there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

While not everyone is going to agree with her devout atheism, I hope we can all agree that we, and the world around us, are a work of art.