Every seed mattered

It is summertime. I am eight years old and on summer break. I have been an early bird for as long as I can remember, and that morning I get out of bed at sunrise and run barefoot outside. I still vividly remember the smell of grass in the early morning and the chilly dew on my feet.

I am going to our garden for one specific thing: fresh cucumbers. And there they are.

I am in awe. Just the evening before, I could have sworn they weren’t there. Now the garden is full of cucumbers ready to be picked. In my eight-year-old mind, this is equivalent to magic. I don’t know anything about the processes that allowed it to happen, I only know that somehow, while I was sleeping, our garden had been busy growing. And that breakfast is going to be especially tasty.

I grew up in a rural area, where we produced much of our own fruit and vegetables. My family was in a difficult financial situation, and that made us resourceful. From an early age, my mother taught us to forage for edible and medicinal plants in the surrounding pastures, sharing knowledge she had learned from her own mother. Growing food was not just a hobby. Every seed mattered.

Perhaps that is why plants never felt like background scenery to me. They were food, medicine, and part of everyday life. But they also raised endless questions. How can something as small as a seed become an entire organism? How could it build roots, leaves and flowers, eventually, feed a family? I couldn’t name it then, but what fascinated me was plant development.

Unlike animals, plants continue making new organs throughout their lives. Hidden within their growing tips are populations of stem cells that give rise to new tissues and structures. From these small groups of cells, plants can regenerate virtually indefinitely. Rooted in one place, these organisms have evolved an astonishing ability to adjust to the everchanging world around them. The more I learned, the stranger (and more fascinating) they became.

My questions eventually took me even further back in time. I became interested not only in how plants develop, but in how these remarkable ways of growing came to exist in the first place. Today, I study the evolution of the green lineage: the ancient history that ultimately gave rise to the diversity of green organisms around us. From your unassuming lawn grass, to rose flowers, and all the way to giants such as sequoia trees. 

In some ways, I am still asking the question that began in our garden: how did we get here? From a single cell to a complex organism. From ancient green lineages to the diversity we see today. And from a seed in the soil to a cucumber that seemed to appear overnight. I know now that the cucumber’s growth was not magic. Behind it were cells dividing and expanding, tissues differentiating, and signals responding to the environment. Behind those processes lies an even older story, more than a billion years of evolutionary change. Sometimes I think back to that eight-year-old standing barefoot in the wet grass, inspecting the garden in amazement. I understand much more about the fascinating world of plants than she did.

But I am not sure it seems any less magical.