How to appreciate the growing, blooming, alive, respiring plant and probe its innermost workings at the very same time? How do you describe the real world in such a way that you construct an accurate model? How do you understand both the whole and the parts? Ever since I brought my African violet, Murphy, to work and rediscovered my love of cultivating plants I've been pondering these questions with little success.
I bought Murphy at Kroger's the second night I moved to my current job at the labs. Murphy was the prettiest of the group on display, with delicate, purple and white flowers and nice, firm leaves. At the checkout counter the clerk accidentally sliced off several of the largest leaves, leaving the plant with a lop-sided appearance. Oh well. I put it on my windowsill and promptly forgot to water it for a week or so. After discovering that my violet was looking a bit limp, somehow, during the 10-foot trip from my windowsill to the sink, I managed to drop my violet plant-first on the ground. Somehow, I managed to do this several times over the next few weeks. Needless to say, it lost soil and I didn't get around to replacing it. But it struggled on. I switched apartments after a month and dropped my plant again. Then I moved again, to cheaper accommodations and relegated the plant a low table, where my newly adopted dog blithely knocked it over with his magnificent tail. I watered it occasionally and shifted it around the apartment, musing that its lighting requirements weren't being met. At some point, I realized that my plant had had a most unfortunate life ever since I'd bought it. Still, though admittedly ragged and unhealthy looking, it was alive, and I named it Murphy, after Murphy's law. Last summer I finally decided to bring it to work with me, thinking that perhaps it would do well under the fluorescent light at my desk.
To say that Murphy did well would be an understatement. Murphy flourished. Having the plant in front of me all the time was encouragement enough to give it some much-needed TLC. I added some soil to the pot and gave it a bit of 10-10-10. Most importantly, I kept it stationary on my desk instead of traipsing around with it. I recently re-potted Murphy in a larger pot and Fafard mix and have been enjoying almost uninterrupted blooms ever since. I am not modest about Murphy. I love talking about my plant and showing it off to people and telling the story behind the name.
For me, plants are far more than simply the taxonomic group I've chosen to do research on. I love them and always have. When I'm driving, I unconsciously identify trees and wildflowers on the roadside. At art galleries I am drawn to the intricately tiny plants Medieval and Rennaissance artists painted in the backgrounds of their classic renditions of Madonnas and saints. I am also fascinated by the disjoint between the methods and principles of botanical study and the art of growing plants; for you can do one with excellence and fail at the other. You can love you some molecular biology and care less about that random field flower you carelessly spotted while trying to figure out why the fragments in your gel aren't the right size even after redesigning the primers. You could recognize and appreciate close to every single plant species growing in a forest, yet have not a clue about the staggering array of busy mRNAs and proteins massed in a single cell of one plant among those myriad species.
I sit at my desk, with Murphy and various other favored plants that I feed, water, and fuss over between gels and protein assays in front of me. How does the science I do on frozen leaf tissue dissolved in chemicals fit together with the simplicity of my alive and entire African violet plant, faithfully flowering away?
Image upper left: Murphy, after luck turned, photographed by Arabidopsisgirl
