PLANT

“I’ve never met a houseplant I haven’t killed.”

So says a lady I know and admire, for everything but her houseplant skills. 

I have the opposite problem.

I’ve never met a plant that I can bear to let perish. (Yes, that is a sentence. Sorry. My kids are on Spring Break. So, too, my ability to write a coherent sentence!)

Wilting. Gray. Dropping leaves by the dozen. It doesn’t matter.

I’ll try to save the plant.

Shower it with attention, water, fertilizer, sunlight.  Give it a chance to live.  To bloom again.

The ferns that adorned our front porch last summer and fall? They are presently more black than green, more shriveled than leafy; but still they live and breathe beneath the skylights in the master bath (there’s nowhere else to put them.)

The geraniums that survived the first (only) frost last December? They are now a sparse, yellow-green array of leaves and branches that, but for three and a half summer-red blossoms, would join the garbage and recycling on the curb.   

Jerusalem Palm, Chinese Evergreen, Aglonomena, Jade, Calathea, Spider Plant, Japanese Aralia, Ficus, African Violet, Cacti – as well as numerous plants I cannot find in Google Images - happily coexist with the people and dogs in our house.

We (I) relocate them from room to room, and indoors to outdoors as seasons change.

We (I) sometimes even rescue strays from neighbors’ curbs (yes, I did recently save five hydrangea bushes from death by ground-yanking and three-point turns.)

Husband has begged me to give some plants away; the schefflera meandering across the kitchen ceiling, for instance. “I’ll trim it back,” I promise. But Husband knows that severing a portion of a plant is almost as traumatic to yours truly as terminating it.

This Mardi Gras, he will be happy to know that I am not the only certifiable plant lady in the world. 

In north-northern Norway, more than two million seeds -  one of every plant we eat -  are being stored in an ultra-high security, ultra-low temperature bank called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.  More than 100 nations have left seeds in this vault, so that important plant species can be recovered in the event of some cataclysmic event.

The vault was established in 2008, though many scientists doubted it would ever be necessary or useful.

Until recently, when once skeptical Russian scientists began singing along with The Monkees (or Smash Mouth, for all you youngsters.)  Believers, all, they now agree that the Global Seed Vault is “of great interest and importance.”

Why the change of heart?  

Because these Russian scientists have succeeded in growing a flowering plant that is older than agriculture, older than writing, as old as the end of the last Ice Age.  

Yup.

Seems they regenerated the plant from frozen cells they discovered beneath 125 feet of permafrost in northeastern Siberia.  The plant was cultivated in their lab, with help from some “clonal micropropagation,” using seeds and leaves thought to be collected long-ago by a species of squirrels.  Researchers imagine that the squirrel’s burrow was frozen over quickly, and remained undisturbed until they happened upon it.

Stanislav Gubin, an author of the study, spent years searching for the burrows. “The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,” he said. “It’s a natural cryobank.”

A 30,000 year old Seed Vault. 

Radiocarbon dating says this flowering plant - a species of Silene stenophylla - is 31,800 years old, plus or minus 300 years. 

It was buried for 300 centuries in Russian Permafrost, before being revived and grown in a conventional pot. Showered with attention, the plant blossomed, bore fruit, and dropped seeds.

It’s now growing and flourishing as if 30,000 years had never transpired.

Scientists are excited.  “The first generation cultivated from seeds obtained from regenerated plants progressed through all developmental stages and had the same morphological features as parent plants,” reports Svetlana Yashina and a team at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, Russian Academy of Sciences.  “We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth’s surface.”

Remember Quing’s ‘Matter’ blog from early January? Remarkably, we are revisiting permafrost, and all that gunk in our trunk, just six weeks later.  

Scientists say the world’s permafrost - about 20 percent of the planet’s surface - could be a “vast time capsule, a place where ancient life is preserved, could be revived, and could speak volumes about the evolution of life on Earth.”

Cool. 

Another reason to save every plant I own and/or discover! 

You never know what could happen in 30, 000 years. 

QUING Hereby Decrees:  Permafrost: Somebody figure out how to invest in the cool stuff.......