The Metamorphosis of Plants

A chill day with only intermittent and vague brightenings of the sky. After dropping off packages at the post office, I had time for a short hike at the lower arboretum. The Cannon River level was up after the rain, near the tops of its banks.

While standing at the edge of the inundated creek, close to its confluence with the river, I experienced one of those occasional challenges to visual perception, one of those occurrences where the mind tries to make sense of unusual visual data. An object flew, splashed into the water, then swam away beneath the surface. I'd caught a glimpse of yellow and a swimming motion as if it were a small turtle. What could it be? It wasn't a Kingfisher, as that bird is larger and blue and wouldn't have remained underwater. The best my mind could do was the laughable---a flying turtle! After standing there perplexed for a moment, I took a step forward and saw the fisherman on the opposite side of the creek who was reeling in the lure he'd just cast.

Reading Goethe again recently, this quote of his came to mind: ”every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.” What about objects unclearly seen, I wondered?

I searched the meadow that rings the retention pond, then the fallow rectangle in the woods where a group of tennis courts had been removed. Neither place held any dragonflies. Any day now the clubtails, swift, black-and-yellow river dragonflies, would begin to emerge and commandeer these meadows.

Crossing the tennis court field, a Song Sparrow scurried out from under one of my footsteps, startling me. I checked the thick grass at my feet to make sure I hadn’t destroyed its nest. Luckily I’d missed it by a few inches, the beautiful blue-speckled eggs were intact (and without a brown imposter Cowbird egg).

Reading Goethe long ago (and for the first time) as a regimented engineering student, I enthusiastically embraced Goethe’s alternate and naturalistic approach to the sciences. Some of the simple experiments recounted in his Theory of Color and The Metamorphosis of Plants changed how I looked at the world. "Researchers have been generally aware for some time that there is a hidden relationship among various external parts of the plant that develop one after the other and, as it were, one out of the other... The process by which one and the same organ appears in a variety of forms has been called the metamorphosis of plants." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790)

It occurred to me to photograph the leaves of the Small-flowered Buttercup. The sequence of leaf shapes from base to flower changes quite dramatically for this plant and were similar to some of the illustrations in Goethe.

Posted on 20 de maio de 2017, 03:05 AM by