Reconsidering the Plant Kingdom

After hearing the celebrated ethnobotanist/real-life Indiana Jones-adventurer/poet/scholar lecture at the National Geographic Society, I nabbed a copy of Wade Davis' One River from Amazon. I'm just beginning the text, reading a few chapters before my far-too-late bedtime here and there, but so far, I can only praise and gush Dr. Davis' authorship. The eloquent lyricism of his lecture is echoed on the pages of his memoirs and tribute to his mentors, Richard Evans Schultes and Tim Plowman. Clearly these figures themselves possessed many of Davis' gifts. Consider the brief excerpt below, from Davis' early travels in Colombia with Plowman.

..."Why would a plant give a shit about Mozart? ...and even if it did, why should that impress us? I mean, they eat light. Isn't that enough?"

"He went on to speak of photosynthesis the way an artist might describe color. He said that at dusk the process is reversed and that plants actually emit small amounts of light. He referred to sap as the green blood of plants, explaining that chlorophyll is structurally almost the same as the pigment of our blood, only that the iron in hemoglobin is replaced by magnesium in plants... Unlike every other botanist I had known, he was not obsessed with classification. For him Latin names were like koans or lines of verse. He remembered them effortlessly, taking particular delight in their origins. "When you say the names of the plants," he said at one point, "you say the names of the gods."

-Davis recounting memories of his colleague Tim Plowman