The Cost of Mobility–Ch. 5

Teaser Tuesday #2 for Drawing Botany Home (https://rmbooks.com/book/drawing-botany-home/)

Animals move—it’s our birthright,  a gift from our ancestors in the form of duplicate genes that code for leg or wing or fin.  Yet no mobility is without risk. When my mother married a stranger, my family abandoned British Columbia for Montana. Years later, I jump at the chance to return. But arriving ‘home,’ I struggle to land in place.  En route to visit old friends, I wonder what it would take to be as rooted as a tree. For cottonwoods, dispersal is easy, establishment harder.  Only one in a million seeds released from a cottonwood will successfully root. All trees are mirrored rivers, their form collecting nourishment from both sky and earth—but only if they remain in place. The bigger a tree’s roots, the harder the transplant, the deeper the scars. The bigger a tree’s roots, the harder the transplant, the deeper the scars. In plants, it is the passage of water, slipping from one cell to another, that links earth with sky. In the reciprocal relationship between people and place, don’t stories do the same? 

 

Coming April 25, 2023!

https://rmbooks.com/book/drawing-botany-home/