When on a walk on November 9th, last year I collected some strange looking seeds on the path to the bay. There were maybe two berries among the seeds maybe, one seed looked like a funny hat, some looked very much like little stones.
I put them all into a semi-clear 35mm film container, to maybe later put them into soil. I have no idea how this little container landed in the drawer of my night-stand, but this is where I found it, a week or so ago. Inside was a sour smell, sly fruity maybe, more like wine gone bad, there were some serious mold spores, the white camembert kind to go with it. There has been obviously some fermentation going on here, the little oxygen left in the container had been probably eaten up by the little mold plants. (Dear biologist, I am not one, please feel free to correct my caveman-assumptions.)
I emptied the container into one of my "experiments and found things" flower pots. It is a pot with good soil into which I drop some of the remains of plants which for some miraculous reason might have survived the pre-supermarket radiation treatment and which I could as well just throw out...
I covered the seeds with barely any soil, I moved the one with white fur into a deeper indentation in the ground. And I forgot about these fellows again.
It was yesterday that I noticed a little three inch tall plant, in a very joyful spring green lurk its two wings from the blackish soil. The wings were leaves of course, but they appeared as if they were something else. It appeared as if they were protecting something between them. The plant grew over an inch since yesterday and I can now see that the two leaves were indeed somehow just there to protect a more fragile content from being bruised as the tree-to-be poked through the surface of the soil. The two fleshy leaves are now open, the seemingly main portion of the plant appears for now to be four leaves, each one of them consisting of about 18sub-leaves. It feels like an incredible miracle. I do not have a camera that would allow me to post an image here right away. I tried to draw the little buddy, but it is not easy due to its size. I put the largest magnifier onto my camera lucida (12x) and attached the 19th century tool to the wacom tablet connected to Adobe Illustrator. Without being able to really monitor what I am doing, I at least tried to trace the proportions of this new guest. (12x was too strong actually, I ended up using 10x).
As I was drawing the outlines of the new tree, I was so close to the flower pot that I could smell the moist black soil. And it reminded me of the smell of the forest in which I had found the seeds seven months ago. If plants could smell...
But they can certainly take in nutrients. Maybe what I smell is what makes the little buddy go.
I will need to take pictures... just won't be able to post them right away...