I’m not by nature a gregarious person, but rather, a lover of solitude. I think better when I’m alone, preferring to walk by myself. I notice the incredible details of nature this way and experience the unexpected, like a cape fritillary butterfly who landed on my shoulder this morning.
My first book was composed while walking. When I returned to my study, I set down ideas from my ramble into words, paragraphs and chapters.
An Anna’s Hummingbird whizzing by yesterday would have escaped my attention if I was talking with a companion. Not that a hummingbird can change my life, but by acknowledging its unique presence and stopping to admire it, I’ve paid homage to the natural world of which I am a very tiny part.
On a woodland walk, I decided to focus on the shapes and patterns of leaves. Surrounded by leaves, I was struck by their infinite variety, shape, colour and texture. I suddenly remembered what Stan once told me while he was forking out weeds, that plants make up 85 percent of what’s alive on Earth. I can’t get enough of that 85 percent. Through all the troubles of this age and my age, my garden patch nurtures both wildlife and me.
Contemplating a leaf, whether crinkled, mottled or flush with life, gives me hope; rather, a kind of certainty that there is more to life than interest rates, gas prices, market forces and the latest high-tech gadget. That there’s space for you and for me, for the whole wheel of life, big and small, seen and unseen.
So, what would our planet be without terrestrial and aquatic leaves? Totally devoid of life.
Leaves and photosynthesis
Leaves are vital to a mechanism called photosynthesis, a process that’s fundamental to life on Earth, whereby oxygen is processed from carbon dioxide, allowing us to breathe. Our atmosphere is 21 percent oxygen. That’s a good thing for us humans, but plants don’t breathe as we do. They don’t respirate. They transpire through their leaves.
Here’s a short bit about how this works:
Plants build themselves from the ground up. Within the root system of a plant is a series of cells, each of them stacked one on top of another, forming a pipette of sorts. A pipette draws in liquid, using surface tension. That’s basically the way plants take in moisture from the ground; and, through transpiration, plants recycle carbon dioxide gas that’s present in the soil and air.
Gases pass through the body of the plant, and when they reach the very tips of the leaves, they have been modified by photosynthesis, a process that occurs in the leaves of a plant. This process requires both chlorophyll and light energy. During photosynthesis, the chlorophyll in leaves helps convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and glucose.
Oxygen is then passed through the stomata of the leaf. The “stomata” are portals in plant leaves that control gas exchange. How many stomata are in an average leaf? About 300 per millimetre. That’s a lot of stomata. Each is probably one-hundredth of the width of a hair, and there are quite literally millions of them all along the edges of every leaf.
These tiny stomata have effectively changed the atmosphere of the Earth over the last 500 million years! The truth is that before the Devonian Era (roughly 400 million years ago), the Earth was largely filled with carbon dioxide. We couldn’t have breathed if it wasn’t for plants creating our modern atmosphere.
Besides doing all that, leaves are endlessly beautiful, the subject of great paintings that I admire, particularly landscape artists who laser in on one flower or leaf so I don’t get lost in a blur of greenery. Georgia O’Keeffe was a master at reimagining the plant world, taking us close-up within her sizable canvases.
A woodland walk is where I go to lose myself, and it’s where I go when I want to find myself. I just look, ponder, admire and breathe the air that leaves have given us.
«VERWANDTES LESEN» ENDANGERED MONARCH BUTTERFLIES: From Michoacan to my garden»
Bild 1 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day von Pixabay; image 2 Douglas-fir needle stomata Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
