The Power of Plants.

Is there anything in the known world as ingenious as Nature? Our founder, Lucy Johnson, remembers how her Godfather, the late author Brendan Lehane, knew where to look for the solutions we need to heal the ecological crisis.

Last year, my beloved Godpa, Brendan Lehane, died. He was a gifted writer, and as well as his many published books, he would pen me the occasional letter full of his particular brand of wit and wisdom. Often, he wrote of his love for the natural world and its miraculous power, and what it could teach us humans who so often forget that we are a part of its rich web. Those letters had a deep effect on me. 

This is a passage from his book, The Power of Plants, published in 1977, that, for me, bursts with a vivid understanding of the creative genius and tenacity of nature. As  we search for solutions to the crisis in the natural world, it’s clear there is so much to learn from nature and Brendan’s advice to me echoes in my mind: Nature is the greatest teacher.

The Power of Plants, by Brendan Lehane

“Behind the fragrance of a violet and the frail beauty of a rose lies the most tenacious life force in the world: the power of plants to survive. From the momentous day, a billion or so years back, when the first speck of plant protoplasm puffed its first breath of oxygen into some primeval sea, the collective energy of plants has been directed at the colonisation of the world. The means of their success has been an almost limitless capacity to change, to assume so many shapes, colours, sizes and other diversifications that some of them, somewhere, always succeed.

Other plants fail. But in nature even failure is not waste. The fallen tree is leached of goodness by a fungus; the fungus is sucked dry by bacteria; the bacteria decompose into the raw elements of plant growth. Continuing life depends on continuing death and decay. Successful species are fortified by those that fail, and the lottery of gene mutations has spread plants not only through the world’s congenial reaches but over bleak tundra, icy wastes, scorched desert. The means they have evolved to survive in different stations are countless.

They imbibe sunlight and make vital power of it. They create life from non life and nourish not only themselves but the whole animal creation - many of whom they put to work for their own purposes. They range in size from minute microbes to the world’s most massive, tallest creatures. They live to whatever age suits them, be it a matter of hours or five thousand years. They can break rocks, staunch floods, precipitate rain, or knit sand to resist the buffets of the sea.

After catastrophes of fire, eruption, hurricane and avalanche they can rise again, like the phoenix, to retrace their patient progress across the land. To procreate their species, they have enslaved whole races of insects. To spread themselves, they enlist wind, sea and animals as porters. No man can garner sunbeams, or commit his offspring to the wind for a journey of a thousand miles. A dandelion can. 

Science has far to go before it matches the ingenuity of a wayward seed.”

The Power of Plants by Brendan Lehane, published 1977 by McGraw-Hill publishers.

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