Primula veris was the first. She will always be the first.
Thursday, the 13th of April, almost on the day two years ago:
I am sitting uncomfortably jammed as usual on the old, creaking wooden benches in the auditorium of the Albrecht-Haller-Institute for plant-science located in the silent one-way street ‘Untere Karspüle’, somewhat apart from all the other faculties, the bus-hub and central shopping center of Göttingen just 150m further south-west. This auditorium, however old-fashioned and badly equipped it is on the inside, is like a little island of less – surrounded by cycling crowds of economy and social science students. This is mainly because of its direct proximity to the old botanical garden.
And this idyllic place – seperated of a busy road just by a stony wall, naturally and beautifully overwhelmed by escaping shrubs and climbing plants of the gardens – is going to be my entering door into a new world. And the keys to this door – how else could it be – are in the yellow, nicking flower umbels of Primula…
I want to paint the picture a little more detailed until I introduce you to the plant itself:
After some jokes about pressing whole trees into a herbarium in the introduction to the module of ‘systematics and diversity of the flowering plants’ it is time to take the path through the botanical garden to the buildings for the practical course part. I have passed many times with big eyes and a sensitive nose through the narrow, middle-age-fashioned tunnel into the old botanical garden with its little pond, wild garlic along the ways and bright green frogs greeting the daytrip-visitors of Göttingen and students and professors rushing to classes or taking a break in the sun. This module just kickstartes my second semester in Göttingen, in the moment where spring arrives simultanously to gift us with endless fields of flowers to study. Today there is a surprise in the darkness of the short tunnel: A duck blocks the way and seems to have lost herself. We show her the way out and shortly later, I find myself in the group of Dr. Schwerdtfeger. Thanks to the improvised, heart-felt efforts of one of my fellow students ‘Babsi’, we quietly change groups, and ‘Schwerti’ (the short form of the concealed reason for which Babsi recommended changing the group…) surely doesn’t mention any objections, obviously being spontanous and heartfelt himself. And it is in this first practical class, where Primula elatior (a close, a little rarer, relative of Primula veris) is in the focus of our attention and with it for me a whole new way of consciously experiencing plants…
Ever since I need to smile when I stumble across another cowslip – as is the English common name of Primula, thinking back on this sunny spring day where everything started. I am fascinated by the simplicity – a rosette of simple, slightly serrated leaves, an erect, leafless stem with an umbel of yellow, absolutely ‘standard’ flowers presenting 5 adnate petals that form a tube and a bright green calyx also with 5 sepals, bell-shaped adnated. That’s about it, which is why of course, we studied this plant in our first week, where complicated ‘zygomorphic’ flower-designs would have been like quantum mechanics for a first year physics student.
In the north of Spain, where I discovered the above individual of Primula veris, there are now fields of these egg yolk yellow ‘key rings’…The German common name ‘Schlüsselblume’ is an exact reference to this similarity to a bunch of keys clustered together. The quite tall, super ‘free-climbing’ stem – though it is as soft as a velvet because of little hairs – sometimes creates the illusion that these around 10-20 yellow keys are just floating in empty space a little elevated over the surrounding grass.
In opposition to dandelions for example I think they don’t look so impressive when they appear en masse in a sunny, exposed field for example. But even more so a single, exposed individual shines with it’s aggregation of flowers reaching in all directions from a single point on the tip of their stem. A flower like this was what I searched for and found next to a similar exposed oak tree on a steep pasturage. Once again I was drawn into the world of Primula with its curious heterostyly of their flowers for example: The length of the styli and the position of the stamens within the yellow tubes and their species characteristic orange drops on the petal-lobes varies from one plant to another. You have to excuse all the specific botanic terms, I try to balance very specialised information with poetic art and personal perspective, because I am convinced it roots in the same soil of life…
To put it more simple now and eventually come across some general ideas that Primula veris manifests when it appears as one of the first in early spring – in Spain it could be as early as February, I would like to explain heterostyly as I understand its purpose and idea: In one plant the style is lower and what you see when you look into indeed all of the flowers of this plant are the stamens, now in the neighboring plant it is probably the same – as I personally checked in the field by the way ;). This makes it unlikely that flowers in close proximity to each other will fertilize themselves, because stamen+stamen does not make a new plant obviously. However a more distant individual within the same population may present their stigma (the final part of the style, a part of the female reproductive organ) above the stamens. That’s where the combination of stamen+stigma becomes possible. Across individuals of the same population.
Now I was just asking myself why Primula veris would even bother to produce stamens in the high-styli-indiduals and respectively styli in the high-stamen-individuals? The answer is simply to still have the option of self-fertilisation. Some trees have evolved to even give up that option and be diocious, with female flowers completely on one individual and male flowers on another. Remember, for us this is how it works. This is one of the central principles of nature. Men and women. But for plants, this is not how it works. For plants everything about sexuality is mixed up in a confusing structure of male and female parts, of individuals and groups of individuals. There are so many forms of sexuality and asexuality that compete and work together in plants, that it’s difficult to get to a sort of basic configuration. I feel that part of the solution could lie in the observation, that the degree to which lifeforms of any kind are seperated in male and female (parts) is imperfect even and maybe for our understanding most urgently in a biological sense! Plants show us, that it is possible to have intermediate strange forms of a kind of sort of seperation between sexes as it is the case with the evolved process of heterostyly in Primula veris. This for me clearly points in the direction, that even in apparent fully individually evolved sexes as it is the case with some trees and yes seemingly craved in stone within the human race, there is a degree of overlapping. A degree of evolvability, and a degree of a non-deterministic trait. There is no basic configuration. Life is even bigger – or smaller, because of its very non-deterministic nature…- than one of its main components and defining characteristics, by which it is created in the first place: Reproduction.
plantingconsciousness 