Ancients of Days
Nov. 18th, 2005 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaI've mentioned before that my concept of "earth" as an element is the stuff of the biosphere, the skin between bedrock and sky. Enchanted Rock scares the crap out of me. It's not supposed to be here; it's deep rock, exposed bone-of-the-world, closer to fire than to soil. There are people who are drawn to the inorganic part of the element, the stone and igneous rock. Not me, though.
That skin on land is so recent, though - it took aeons for water and wind to pound rock into silt, sand, and dust. It can't have become true soil as we know it until about 500 million years ago, when the land plants first reared their stems from the mud and began adding their fixed carbon, fixed nitrogen, and roots to keep the dirt from blowing or washing away.
There are a number of people, including every three-year-old boy in the known universe, who identify strongly with prehistoric animals. I'm not immune to this myself; I have a bizarre identification with the nautiloid cephalopods. But I find the prehistory of plants far more interesting, not only because I generally have as much plant empathy as animal empathy, but because they had to colonize the land before we could.
The flowering plants, the most common type now, are even more recent than the mammals are. In fact, one could argue that the dominant forms of large life around right now owe their existence to quite recent changes in reproduction, that the placenta and the blossom, the pregnant belly and the ripe fruit are in some sense parallel changes. Keeping one's developing young tucked inside flesh instead of a flimsy shell is a good idea. (This puts the coniferous gymnosperms in the same company as reptiles. Given the simultaneous reign of the dinosaurs and the great pines, this seems appropriate.)
Anyway, it occurred to me today that there was a class of plant always mentioned alongside the ferns, the conifers, and the ginkgoes as the pre-flowering plants - the cycads. And I knew next to nothing about them. After doing some research and finding this page here, I still don't know very much, except that they look a lot like palms and palmettos, and they have wonderfully non-pine-tree-like cones. I can easily imagine, though, a world with these, the conifers, and the ginkgo-relatives as the top plants, a world where flower never bloomed.
It feels simultaneously as alien as Enchanted Rock and almost like home.
I shall have to pursue the shape of the Green Man in his youth more fully . . .
That skin on land is so recent, though - it took aeons for water and wind to pound rock into silt, sand, and dust. It can't have become true soil as we know it until about 500 million years ago, when the land plants first reared their stems from the mud and began adding their fixed carbon, fixed nitrogen, and roots to keep the dirt from blowing or washing away.
There are a number of people, including every three-year-old boy in the known universe, who identify strongly with prehistoric animals. I'm not immune to this myself; I have a bizarre identification with the nautiloid cephalopods. But I find the prehistory of plants far more interesting, not only because I generally have as much plant empathy as animal empathy, but because they had to colonize the land before we could.
The flowering plants, the most common type now, are even more recent than the mammals are. In fact, one could argue that the dominant forms of large life around right now owe their existence to quite recent changes in reproduction, that the placenta and the blossom, the pregnant belly and the ripe fruit are in some sense parallel changes. Keeping one's developing young tucked inside flesh instead of a flimsy shell is a good idea. (This puts the coniferous gymnosperms in the same company as reptiles. Given the simultaneous reign of the dinosaurs and the great pines, this seems appropriate.)
Anyway, it occurred to me today that there was a class of plant always mentioned alongside the ferns, the conifers, and the ginkgoes as the pre-flowering plants - the cycads. And I knew next to nothing about them. After doing some research and finding this page here, I still don't know very much, except that they look a lot like palms and palmettos, and they have wonderfully non-pine-tree-like cones. I can easily imagine, though, a world with these, the conifers, and the ginkgo-relatives as the top plants, a world where flower never bloomed.
It feels simultaneously as alien as Enchanted Rock and almost like home.
I shall have to pursue the shape of the Green Man in his youth more fully . . .
