as wild as

It is March and snowing today. What a weird winter.

In the interest of doing something enjoyable today (I've been at school since 9 am and will be here til 8:30), here is the post I've been meaning to write about this blog title. "We once did grow wild as apples" is a quote from the Veda Hille song, appropriately enough called "Plants."
Veda Hille is not for everyone, but for those among us with a hippy dippy animist bent, she's amazing. Much of her music describes the way I feel about my relationship to nature. My very favorite song of all time is "Greenery." I've never been able to find the lyrics to this on line, so here is the chorus from memory

Woods you are very sly
reveal yourselves to us
sway the rythm of spaces
woods you are very sly

for all that you stand so firmly rooted
there are comings and goings
there is sunlight and shadows

The more I learn about plants and their constant, silent activities, their warfare, making and breaking of alliances, their precarious, dynamic balance, the more insightful that seems.

"Plants" is a song about our relationship with poisonous/medicinal plants and domestication. The line "we once did grow wild as apples" didn't make any sense to me in this context until I learned from Michael Pollan's excellent Botany of Desire. Pollan spends a chapter discussing the apple's history and it's essentially wild nature.

Apples come from Central Asia, like many of our most common food plants. In Armenia there are huge forests full of apple trees, as big as oaks, or shrublike, with fruit as sour and small as olives or huge and soft and red, or anything in between. The tasty ones were propagated by travelers who took the sweetest apples. Apples are heterozygotes, and sweetness must be recessive because they pretty much always cross back to the crabapple--breeding the sweet apples we eat today was the result of thousands of cider-apple orchards and probably yet more thousands of hours of labwork. Since cider has gone out of fashion, the genetic stock of the domesticated apple has become dangerously homogeneous, requiring ever more chemical assistance as its predators evolve but we hold it in stasis by our need for the perfect apple.

I won't push the analogy to far, but Hille and Pollan make me think about our relationship to plants, especially as food and medicine, and the way we shape them, illustrates how we have been shaping ourselves.

Outside, the sun has come out, and I am watching a man walk slowly around the park, touching every tree, grinning. He might be crazy, but I think it's more likely that he is some kind of hippy dippy animist.