The Last Word On Nothing

I wrote this post in 2019, and am still gobsmacked by flower hormones.

Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them.

Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a corner for a week, then a month. By the time I opened the bags again, in early January, some of the bulbs were dusted with mildew. I’d lost the instructions for when to plant the different types of bulbs, and what bulb belonged to which type of flower. As I brushed the mold away, I contemplated how little I knew, not just about these flowers, but about flowers in general.

Understanding flowers is not trivial. Darwin referred to the awesome expansion of flowering plants during the late Cretaceous period as “the abominable mystery.” The ability to manipulate flowering has always been key to crop domestication, allowing humans to expand the range of rice, wheat, corn and other staples. Despite this, scientists only recently discovered how flowering works on a molecular level. 

The story is surprisingly brutal, and begins with chrysanthemums. In the early 1930s, Russian plant physiologist Mikhail Chailakhyan was trying to figure out how plants sense light and dark, and decide when to flower. He shone light on different parts of chrysanthemum plants — the stem, the leaves — and found it was the leaves that sensed light. When leaves detect a certain daylength, the plant bursts into bloom, he discovered. 

By then, scientists knew about hormones, signaling chemicals that travel through the bloodstream in animals. Hormones are molecules of transformation, controlling everything from the sprouting of hair to the thickening and thinning of the uterine lining.  Chailakhyan proposed the existence of a hormone in plants that travels from leaf to stem and triggers flowering. He dubbed the hormone “florigen,” or “blossom-former.”

Chailakhyan performed experiment after experiment to prove that florigen exists.  He transferred sap from the leaves of a flowering tobacco plant into the Chenopodium rubrum, or goosefoot plant, and showed that it induced the sprouting of tiny purple blossoms. A similar infusion in potato plants triggered the formation of tubers, he and his colleagues showed.

I saw a bucket of yeast at the brewery last week and I thought it looked like joy.

Not because beer is delicious (though it is), but because it could not be contained. As the beer fermented in a giant tank, the yeast dribbled from a pipe into the five-gallon bucket, bubbled and pulsed like a heart, rose to the brim, and—in frothy streams that left a growing puddle on the floor—overflowed and overflowed and overflowed.

Sometimes, in cold places, a river will overtop its ice and wend for awhile across its winter shroud before diving again. This is called overflow. Perhaps you are lucky enough to feel something like that, too—a sense of climbing out of the dark, of warmth and light that fills you to bursting, of frothing past the bounds of your skin.

I noticed it at a packed concert hall, this weekend. People pressed close in rows of seats, next to neighbors and friends and strangers they do not often see, in these pandemic times. Their chatting voices filled the room, even after the music began, like they simply could not stop, their low hum lifting the guitar and mandolin and bass and banjo, all of it spilling out into the freezing night.

I felt it alone, too, when I traded $50 for some old fish-scaled touring skis and bright yellow telemark boots. I strapped into them on a deeply snowed-over back road, strange on my thick new ankles. The glide up the slope started awkward, then smoothed, the dogs running ahead of my steady shuffle, their tongues flapping, the russet in their coats the same color as fall’s last clinging leaves. I gathered a few from a stem, folded them like pages into the pocket of my fanny pack. In those late afternoon hours, fog came in waves through the naked aspens and willows. The heavy overcast sky blended all light and shadow into twilight blue. The cold gathered in the sweaty band of my sports bra and the small of my back.

But when I turned back downhill into the rush of effortless motion—there it was, and I spread my arms wide to make room for it in the small cavern of my body. A color? A sound? A smell? A touch? Everything at once. Nothing I can describe better than that escape of river, that bucket of yeast.

Overflow.