Yesterday I wrote about a tree I know that has obviously seen tough times.  I’m not a dendrologist or arborist… not even a biologist, so I can’t guess what might have caused its bruises and knots and twists.  I know that I like that tree.  It definitely has a history that isn’t placid and uneventful. The tree has character.  I’ll never ride down that path again without looking at it with appreciation and respect… which brings me to the thought and the images that my blog writing today.

     Growing in a flower pot on my back porch a beautiful succulent that I was given a long time ago is blooming in the middle of this winter.  I don’t remember who gave it to me, and I don’t know the plant’s name.  Perhaps I pinched  it somewhere and started it by rooting it in the pot where it is growing.  By pinched, I don’t mean I stole it.  You know how easy it is to get a cutting to grow by sticking it in soil, even in sand.  I think this is the first year that this one has bloomed.  I’d have noticed it if it had bloomed last year or the year before.  Some  desert plants, like the century plant, die after they bloom… one dramatic display of fertility with a great stalk and flowers towering above most other neighboring plants… and than death.  But that’s not the end.  In that last burst of energy the mother plant surrounds itself with pups that grow up to be what adult plants are meant to be. 

The  century plant, Agave americana commonly also called maguey and American aloe, actually originated in Mexico before it was cultivated worldwide as an ornamental plant. Isn’t it typical that something that is as wonderfully beautiful as the century plant would be given Agave americana as its botanical name?  After I wrote that last sentence I was hit with the thought that I guess I am no different from most other provincial U.S. Americans who think of the name America as a word which belongs to them us first.  It does not belong only to the U.S.  I reminded myself that Mexico and all those other Central American and South American people and places and plants are indeed AMERICAN… and that the history of some of them with the word can be dated back earlier than when it was used by the people who named my country “The United States of America.” 

…another thing I’ve discovered about succulents, perhaps true of other plants but I don’t for sure, is that if you take a cutting and let it begin to dry a bit before sticking it into soil or sand to begin the rooting process, it will flourish more quickly than if you stick a freshly cut, wet stem into the rooting medium. My theory, just an observation, is that a succulent makes a great effort to stay alive if it is left alone and out of soil for a few days.  Of course, the great body of world literature suggests that something like that is true of other living things… like our species, homo sapiens. Nothing like being at the very edge of  annihilation to make an organism try harder to keep on living.

Checking the spelling of annihilation to be sure I got it right, I came upon a term in physics that I might have known once but had forgotten:  pair annihilation… the process in which a particle and antiparticle unite, annihilate each other, and produce one or more photons.

YES!