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Cultivating earthbound organic machinery

Commentary in regard to plants of captivation.

Organic Machinery

Domestication and Bioengineering

A naturally anthropocentric desire to engineer organic machinery that doesn’t seem to present consciousness.

Patterns and Mimicry

Occurrences tend to rhyme, whether biological, culinary, medicinal, or ornamental.

Bonds before our time

Inherited bonds that began between hominins and plants before homo sapiens. We inherited, we’ve forgotten, we’ve expanded, we’ve destroyed–it’s been a wild relationship.

For the wild kinds appear to bear more fruit…but the cultivated plants the better fruit having even flavours which are sweeter and pleasanter–Enquiry into Plants, Book 1, Theophrastus

Ancient Texts

Plants haunt my imagination: beautiful, helpful, benign, edible, medicinal, or dangerous.

An amazing biological machinery with no nervous system that established interdependent communities, and we’ve established relationships with those communities.

Our hominin ancestors had relationships with plants before any humanoid words pointed to the sun or moon. That’s a long and deep connection. Evidence from at least as early as 3 million years ago may suggest selective plant use–check out discussions regarding Paranthropus and Oldowan tools if you’re skeptical.

What seems absurdly wonderful to me is that there are naturally evolving programs that manufacture physical machinery from soil, light and carbon dioxide. That may be mundanely obvious to many people, but the concept fascinates me as a gardener. When I consider the general plethora of biochemistry produced from these organic machines, the whole phenomena reeks of alchemy.

Plant cultivation is this multidimensional game that the gardener plays. A person might simply be growing an ivy plant in a bathroom window to remove an undesirable scent. At the same time, it’s just soil and a plant in a container, and the grower is using a program to transmute immediately available non-living materials, in order increase the physical mass of a biological machine. At the same, intentionally growing any plant is a specific behavior that is a subtle nod to our prehistorical past. All of this is occurring on some level, whether consciously or not, but the grower experiences a unique opportunity to share space and time with another living organism.

Dwarf Improved Meyer Lemon tree

I’ve grown a couple container citrus for almost a decade. The fruit in the picture is from an Improved Meyer Lemon tree. Living in zone 6, I’ve over wintered inside yearly. I used the leaves in tea. Eventually I lost the lemon tree to spider mites one winter. Do you see the bit of chicken wire fencing draped over the plant container in the back? Wild animals repeatedly uprooted this Thai lime tree; the metal seemed to deter them from doing so.

Chicago Hardy Fig

I’ve kept these hardy figs in containers due to my semi-nomadic history. Micro climate conditions definitely affect fruiting: a container plant can produce up to 35-50 decent fruit, or as little as 5 acceptable fruit. Humidity, sun, soil, nutrition, soil, temperatures, and pests are all factors.