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Sherwin Carlquist on DISCOVERY: WIND-POLLINATED UNDERGROUND FLOWERS II. |
I didn’t have anything but my hands to dig with, but I scooped away the sand and found the underground stems, about eight inches below the surface, on which the flowers were formed (bottom left), and, on older stems, acorn-like fruits formed the preceding year (bottom right). By being formed so far underground, the fruits were protected from the frequent bush fires for which Australia is famous. No plant in this family with underground flowers had ever been found before. So that's the main reason I was able to make this discovery. But the other reason is that I was willing to believe that there could be such a thing as a plant with wind pollinated flowers, and that nobody had tumbled to it before. No small amount of discovery is the childlike willingness to see something new and believe it could be something nobody has seen-or at least never understood--before. I published the plant as Alexgeorgea subterranea, a new genus and species named for the Australian botanist Alex George, who had helped me with field work in Western Australia. Now the funny end of the story is that as soon as my article appeared, the Australian expert on the family, Laurie Johnson at the Sydney Botanic Garden, took a plane to Perth and drove to the Jurien Bay sand plain because either he didn't believe me or else he wanted to be as amazed as I was on that October 3rd. I think it’s because he wanted to be as amazed as I was. You don't have to be the discoverer of a strange plant to be amazed by it, you can take the same delight as the first person who saw it. To see a miracle of evolution is just as much fun for thousandth person to see a plant as for the first. The excitement is in knowing what the miracle is, knowing how strange the adaptation is, and how far the plant has departed from its ancestors in order to achieve that adaptation.... |
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© 2002 Sherwin Carlquist