VerdeMente, diálogos con Seres fotosintéticos - Primera semilla

Pilar Santamaría Motta

Los verdaderos guerreros no suelen usar cascos ni armas, sino semillas y tiempo...

Dodonaea viscosa,

Hayuelo (Colombia), Chapulixtle (México), Candela (Argentina) , Jarilla y decenas de nombres más nos evidencian la importancia de este Serleñoso en múltiples culturas.

Sus usos medicinales, rituales, ornamentales, como tutor de cultivos y restaurador de suelos dan poca cuenta de cómo ha labrado su presencia entre nosotros.

Chapulixtle, su nombre en náhuatl, refiere a su increíble resistencia y flexibilidad para habitar desde lugares áridos con poca agua, hasta bosques tropicales y del sub-páramo.

Es uno de nuestros compañeros guardianes del suelo en las cordilleras orientales de Sur América.

Trifolium repens o trébor blanco

Se nos olvida,

que en las minúsculas y más cotidianas cosas de la vida, aquellas que por “comunes” damos por gratuitas, yace con belleza toda la resilencia de la vida...

Este trébor tan común en campos y praderas, resulta un excelente forraje por su alto contenido en Nitrógeno, digestibilidad y capacidad regenerativa. Esto, gracias a ser otro de esos sociables seres que hace simbiosis con las bacterias nitrificantes en sus raíces, para transformar el apetecido Nitrógeno atmosférico en formas comestibles para las plantas; así pues, es un excelente compañero como mejorador del suelo.

Pero no sólo los rumiantes están capacitados para disfrutar de este benéfico habitante pratense (pratense: que se produce o vive en el prado), también resulta un alimenticio complemento para las cocinas hogareñas:

• Cocinándolo 5-10 minutos puede dar un gusto especial a nuestros platos. • Las semillas en harina poseen un inexplorado tesoro nutritivo • y como si fuese poco, sus hojas en infusión se tornan un saludable té...

Y quien sabe del poder de este pequeñito del jardín, ¡nunca caerá por inanición!!!

En la intimidad del bosque nativo, los árboles se visten con su mejor traje de líquen, ellos por si mismos se tornan un pueblo de diminutos rascacielos, el hogar de un microcosmos que da vida a su piel de leño...

Pilar Santamaría Motta

Bióloga, Artista y ser humano admirado de todos los Seres macro y microscópicos. Su trabajo se enfoca en aprehender sobre las relaciones con otros organismos, discurre entre la biología, la historia de los pueblos y diferentes medios explorando la interdependencia de la Ciencia, el Arte y la Vida. En sus proyectos podrá encontrar enormes circuitos de baterías de papas, cultivos de la flora de piel humana o espacios incentivando re-encuentros entre gente humana y gente con clorofila.

Dialogues with Photosynthetic Beings, by Pilar Santamaría Motta

#PLSEnEspanol

Street Trees

by Lily Glaeser

When I worked for the City Of Portland, Urban Forestry, I was part of a team, including many, many volunteers, identifying all the public right-of-way trees in the city. It was a fantastic summer, walking every street, identifying, measuring, and taking pictures of trees. In the fall, my sister, Rose, visited me. My co-workers, Rose, and I piled into a van to go out to eat. One of my co-workers was driving and constantly getting backseat directions, but we still reached our destination. By the end of the drive, Rose burst out laughing. You see, we hadn’t said the name of a single street, we gave directions such as “turn left after the elm tree,” or “after the line of cottonwoods, keep right,” and “park in front of those red maples.” Rose was amazed and amused at how we knew the city. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment just how far I had come -- even in the middle of a bustling city, we could only see the trees!

Lily (left) with her friend, Karen Baumann (right), in Portland, OR with a Heritage Tree Camperdown elm (Ulmus glabra `Camperdownii').

Lily Glaeser is a plant ecologist, currently working and living in Nevada.

#Community #Siblings #Oregon #elm #Tree #forestry #urban

My Family and Fibonacci

by Josée Methot

“Can you remember a time when you experienced awe?”, asked my friend.

My heart jumped: “yes, of course.” The sunflowers.

As if on replay, my mind formed the image: my mother in her garden, her short frame delicate against towering sunflowers; their big bobble heads bouncing against the late summer sky. I was a kid and I was mesmerized.

These weren’t just plants — they were giants. There was a village of giants in my backyard, and my mother was their overall-clad keeper. It was a ragtag group of characters. There was a clique of perfect sunflowers with great posture (the snobs), a thicket of ragged and lumpy ones (the ogres), a lion with a big yellow mane (Simba from the Lion King), and a small peeking meerkat (Timon, his friend). My favourite was dumpy and stooped but had real character — a late era Marlon Brando, charming as ever.

Yellow, orange, lean, thick; I was in awe of them all. I would trace the spirals of their seeds and ponder how things so small could ever get so big.

Much later I would learn about the Fibonacci sequence, “sacred geometry”, and all of that — about how the number of swirling spirals on a sunflower’s face could follow the Fibonacci sequence, where every number is a sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, …). But as a kid I got the gist immediately.

Something else was at play with these sunflowers — some strange confluence of biology and magic. To my mother, the sunflowers were totems of sorts. Things were tough at home then. She had just gone through a messy divorce, cheques were bouncing, and my brother and I were shrieking nincompoops. The sunflowers were her refuge, the dirt a haven. Our backyard giants became canvasses onto which she could paint meaning, as she worked through the questions that arise when life doesn’t go your way. With sunlight, the sunflowers were slowly turning her troubles into sugar; into pillars reaching toward solace.

She kept one sunflower from that year’s record haul and laid it on a patterned cloth. She lugged it all over for years, moving it from rental unit to rental unit. It was a weird constant in topsy turvy times. I grew to resent it. That dead plant was treated better than most farm cats. It left botanical entrails on the floor whenever we moved it. It was the dirty roommate. But I’m starting to come around now. Those sunflowers were our friends at a time when we really needed some brightness. That dead plant was family.

Josée is a watershed specialist based in Alberta, Canada, where she works on a range of water and land use issues. She is still trying to grow the garden of sunflowers of her dreams. She tweets at @Josee_Methot.

#childhood #Mom #Gardening #Garden #Math