Our human umwelt can make it hard for us to fully see plants. In The Cabaret of Plants Richard Mabey discusses the differences between plant life and human (or animal) life, particularly when it comes to distinctions that we think are important, such as age, life and individuality.
“Beings in the natural world – trees especially – don’t often cling to individuality in the way we’d like them to. Their boundaries become amorphous, absorbing and joining with other living forms. The oldest living organisms in the world are probably the subterranean mycorrhiza of ancient forest fungi. They’ve been there since the woods sprang up, tens of thousands of years ago, and live in an intimate partnership with the tree roots, without which neither could survive.”
This amorphous way of living can make trees very difficult to age, or to even define what makes a tree a tree. What if it has multiple trunks or is a stump yet is very much alive? The Bristlecone pine, for example, frequently looks not so much old, as actually dead.
“[T]he bristlecones’ major strategy for survival into extreme old age is, counter-intuitively, to take itself very close to death. As an already ancient tree edges into venerability much of the wood dies back, often leaving just a wisp of living tissue connecting the roots to a handful of twigs….The stresses of old age in bristlecones are purely climatic, not metabolic. The heartwood is so dense and desiccated that instead of rotting it is eroded like stone, by frost and gale-driven rock dust.”
Seeds, too, frequently remain dormant for years and it appears that some, from each year’s crop of seeds, will remain dormant for many years longer than others, perhaps as a type of insurance against a poor germination or growth year. Even seeds found in archeological remains thousands of years old, have been successfully germinated, bringing an extinct species of fig back for one last plant. This process of seed dormancy is not yet well understood, but is well enough known to challenge our centuries old definitions of what is ‘living’.
“The answer given by one American seedbank botanist, Chris Walters, is: ‘If seeds are alive but aren’t metabolising, then maybe we need to rethink our definition of what it means to be alive.’”
Plants can also be cloned much more easily than can animals. Plants that are all-but-extinct, such as those of which only a male or only a female plant remains alive, can be propagated plants through cuttings and then hybridising repeatedly with a close relative to bring back something close to the original. Mabey points out questions of ethics, guilt and tampering that we need to consider when following this path.
“Our sense of ‘the natural’ warps here. The thrill of Promethean creation, of a pathway to reparation for the damage we have done to the natural world, crashes into an ancient Frankensteinian guilt and a simple longing for a world beyond our planning. But these things will happen and we need to learn how to think ethically about them.”
He warns that the temptation to play God is particularly strong with trees since “[t]heir age and singularity give them something of the aura of living artworks, and provenance and authenticity become issues.” Are we bringing this plant back from the near-dead because a living network depends on it, or because it will make us feel less guilty?