Seeds store information, knowing how to grow the copy of
the parent plant. They can be ideal food, and the casing
can be almost indestructible in some cases. They can
travel, very importantly. THE TRIUMPH OF SEEDS is the
triumph of versatile plants. Thor Hanson who has spent
time
living in environments such as the Congo rainforest,
explains that seeds are found everywhere from jungles to
tundra to alpine meadows.
Seeds are of vital important to our lives and economies,
the author explains, as not just the plants but the seeds
themselves are used. Seeds give us wheat, rice, coffee,
sweetcorn, cotton, cocoa, peanuts, almonds, pecans, peas,
pepper, and many more staples and spices. Thor Hanson
tells
of his Central American research expeditions, when he was
delighted to find the sprouting seed of a tree called
almendro on the jungle floor. These trees are considered a
keystone species, helping the survival of many animals and
birds, but they are being felled along with other timbers.
Next he studied the sprouting of avocado pips. These
personal tales bring home how much we know but how much we
yet don't know about seeds and their processes.
From the ancient civilisations to the Silk Road to modern
food price riots, the story swings between times and
continents. The style is informative but easy to read.
Chimpanzee observers say that chimps eat many seeds in the
wild. Each tiny seed, however, doesn't contain a great
deal
of energy, so the chimps need to keep searching. Richard
Wrangham, a biological anthropologist, drew from this
research to state that humans now cannot survive on an
entirely raw diet and are adapted to cooked food, which
improve the energy gained from a wheat grain by a third,
for instance. Our shorter gut, smaller teeth and larger,
energy-hungry brains are his proof. Early hunter-gatherers
fed on a hugely varied diet but farming weeded out those
seeds which did not repay effort.
I was fascinated to learn that the Black Death may have
been partly spread through grain itself. Rat fleas live up
to a year among stored wheat and their larvae have learned
to eat grain. So even a ship or merchant caravan which rid
itself of sick rats, could be carrying the grain to new
homes - and new rats - and with it the infection. This
helps to explain why plague is said to have spread faster
in Britain than the newly arrived black rat.
Thor Hanson describes an interesting and informative day
among farmers rotating wheat and beans in the Palouse
area,
where 90 percent of the grain is sold to Asia. Then he
explains the processes involved in making chocolate, which
is rich in fat instead of starch, and finds out what is
really in a coconut. He spends another fascinating day in
a
New Mexico open coal mine with paeleobotanists, who are
now
deciding that the carboniferous period contained lots of
conifer trees as well as ferns, but only the plants in
swampy areas got preserved as coal. Seeds evolved in drier
uplands. The author also recreates Gregor Mendel's pea-
crossing experiment in his own yard. The oldest known
surviving seed, however, is a date palm grown from a seed
nearly 2,000 years old, an extinct variety grown by
experimenters in 2005 from a dormant seed found by
archaeologists at Masada in Judea. Caffeine has a
fascinating chapter to itself, as does chile pepper,
showing that seeds use chemicals in various ways. Tiny
seeds are blown high up in the Himalayas, where plants
cannot grow, but fungus feeds on them, insects eat the
fungus and spiders eat the insects, in the most extreme
food chain.
The varieties seem endless in this well-written book, with
mouth-watering descriptions of foods but quantities of
biofuels, glues, poisons and waxes. In a hotter drier
world, seed experts consider that we will be planting more
sorghum. Whatever conditions arrive, no doubt some seeds
will be adapted to survive, and we will learn to use them.
There's a small glossary at the end of THE TRIUMPH OF
SEEDS
so even those who are not gardeners can easily enjoy the
extraordinary journeys taken by seeds, through space and
time. Thor Hanson has previously written about feathers,
and the gorilla forest in Uganda, and I find his
exploration of seeds a great read.
We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the
cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff
and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and
civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for
nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of
Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the
Enlightenment, and cottonseed help spark the Industrial
Revolution. And from the Fall of Rome to the Arab Spring,
the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a
Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.
In nature and in culture, seeds are fundamental—objects of
beauty, evolutionary wonder, and simple fascination. How
many times has a child dropped the winged pip of a maple,
marveling as it spirals its way down to the ground, or
relished the way a gust of wind(or a stout breath) can
send a dandelion’s feathery flotilla skyward? Yet despite
their importance, seeds are often seen as a commonplace,
their extraordinary natural and human histories
overlooked. Thanks to Thor Hanson and this stunning new
book, they can be overlooked no more.
What makes The Triumph of Seeds remarkable is not just
that it is informative, humane, hilarious, and even
moving, just as what makes seeds remarkable is not simply
their fundamental importance to life. In both cases, it is
their sheer vitality and the delight that we can take in
their existence—the opportunity to experience, as Hanson
puts it, “the simple joy of seeing something beautiful,
doing what it is meant to do.” Spanning the globe from the
Raccoon Shack—Hanson’s backyard writing hideout-cum-
laboratory—to the coffee shops of Seattle, from gardens
and flower patches to the spice routes of Kerala, this is
a book of knowledge, adventure, and wonder, spun by an
award-winning writer with both the charm of a fireside
story-teller and the hard-won expertise of a field
biologist. A worthy heir to the grand tradition of Aldo
Leopold and Bernd Heinrich, The Triumph of Seeds takes us
on a fascinating scientific adventure through the wild and
beautiful world of seeds. It is essential reading for
anyone who loves to see a plant grow.
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy