Plants are supremely intelligent. They will tell you anything -- the time of day, the cure for cancer, the whereabouts of elephants, when it will rain, why in the world we fall in love.
People are supremely stupid. They almost never know how to ask.
Thank heavens for plant biologists, those few subtle souls who have realized the riches of the vegetable kingdom and figured out how to win them. Woo them, more like it. It's a delicate business. Hand a plant to the average person, and he'll kill it within the week. Not a plant biologist; he'll have it in soil of the proper pH with sprinklers clocked to mist it just when it likes, and what do you know! Before he can reach for his lab book, the little sprout is spilling all sorts of secrets.
Why, just at U.Va., those clever folks have learned how tobacco talks, how weeds cheat time and how certain wildflowers started having sex. All of it happened in a glass box between Gilmer and the AFC, in a modest, four-room hutch that hums day and night with giant fans and glows with simulated sunlight. You can't see much from the outside: The walls are fogged by thousands of leaves breathing moistly within -- the sharp spikes of yucca, coils of ferns, floppy ears of philodendron and tendrils of specimens stranger still. But you can bet there's someone in there most times of the day carefully clipping anthers or measuring stalk height, tucking seeds into a tiny envelope for microscopic dissection. Sometimes they've got a radio on, and often they're whistling along -- perhaps they've found that their subjects enjoy it.
There are some real rock stars: Venus flytraps, Mimosa pudica -- the elusive "sensitive plant" -- and a good number of preposterous-looking cacti. But the majority of company is more domestic. The racks outside are stacked with Plantago, a grassy tuft of nothing much that grows nowhere special. The western-most room is full of Silene, one of the homeliest flowers known to man. Its common name is Maiden's Tears, no doubt the result of some hapless Romeo's ill-chosen bouquet. Its scientific name is even sadder: The eponym Silenus was a minor godling, sidekick to Dionysus, blathering drunk and voice of the charming maxim that "the best thing for man is not to be born, and if born, to die as soon as possible."
But a weed by any other name would be as wise, and these are truly genius -- if, of course, you know how to ask. There's a whole lab working on Plantago, and it's playing quite the trick: No matter how long you watch, it never seems to grow old. Out there in the greenhouse, it's tapping some fountain of youth, unseen and as yet unknown. So there go the plant biologists, tantalized, wheedling their way to the elixir of life.
Silene are even more beguiling. They grow old (they know that's best, remember), but they do something strange along the way. Most plants are hermaphrodites: They put stamens and pistils in the same flowers and that works fine, if bluntly, for reproduction. Silene go for romance. They've evolved -- they're evolving, more rightly -- flowers of separate sex. It's a crazy process: Male sterility spreads like a disease, and in time you've got a gaggle of female plants among the hermaphrodites, fighting over the pollen they can't produce (Maiden's Tears, indeed).
Of course, they do it all very furtively, and if you weren't a plant biologist, you'd never notice a thing. Thank heavens, again, for those bright few, because the story is well worth knowing. Animals were once hermaphrodites, too. Somehow they evolved into male and female (you've noticed that, at least). They may have done it just like the plants, like these plants, the sly Silene in the back of the greenhouse behind Gilmer Hall. No one knows for sure, for now. So there go the plant biologists, transfixed, teasing out the story of sexes.
You've walked by the greenhouse; have you ever peeked in? If you don't look closely, it won't look like anything. From the outside, the prism is all clouded up. But if you catch a clean pane, you can peer in on creatures far smarter than you -- a little kingdom of chlorophyll that knows most everything you could possibly ask. Yes, there's plenty of work for the biologists here, a whole encyclopedic Eden. They've got flowers for trees of knowledge and weeds for trees of life and plenty of other silent saplings, waiting for us all to wise up.
Rachel's column runs biweekly Thursday. She can be reached at rcarr@cavalierdaily.com.
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