Being Green

Back when I only visited the countryside occasionally, I suffered from what botanists call “plant blindness,” described by Zoë Schlanger in her entertaining new book, The Light Eaters, as “the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout.” Now that I live in small-town New England, I’m a bit more literate in the flora I see. A stand of Japanese knotweed, the bamboo-like invasive I’m constantly beating back to the margins of my own yard, indicates there must be a brook or other waterway out there, since that’s how the plant spreads. One wild apple tree by the roadside may have sprouted from a core tossed out of a car, but two or more suggests an old farmstead now consumed by the surrounding brush. I now know I will pine in vain forever for my own patch of partridge berry, a ground cover that flourishes along my favorite trail because it obviously prefers growing in pine needles instead of under the deciduous trees in my yard. But above all, I know that a lifetime of study couldn’t tell me everything that’s going on out there in the green. And the thrill I get every time a seed I’ve planted germinates never dims.