Audio Option here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNnOAOT4plk

Asters and Goldenrod

I like to imagine that they were the first flowers I saw, over my mother’s shoulder, as the pink blanket slipped away from my face and their colors flooded my consciousness. Love at first sight. I’m guessing all eyes were on me, a cute little round baby, but mine were on asters and goldenrod. I was born to these flowers, and they come back for my birthday every year to celebrate with me.

Eighteen years later, I arrived at university. There were hardly any women at the forestry school in those days and certainly none who looked like me. I wanted to make a good first impression, so I had all my answers prepared for the freshman interview. The adviser peered at me over his glasses and said,

“So, why do you want to major in botany?” His pencil was poised over the registrar’s form.

How could I tell him that I was born a botanist? That I had shoeboxes of seeds and leaves under my bed, that I’d stop my bike along the road to identify a new species, that plants colored my dreams. That the plants had chosen me? So, I told him the truth. I wanted to study botany because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together.

The two plants often grow together, rather than living apart. Surely, in the order and the harmony of the universe, there was an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. I wanted to know why that was. I wanted to know why certain stems bent easily for baskets and some would break, why the biggest berries grew in the shade, and why they made us medicines. I wanted to know which plants are edible, and so much more. I’m sure I was smiling then, in my red plaid shirt. But he was not. He laid down his pencil. Apparently, there was no need to record what I had said. He told me that science was not about beauty, not about the connection between plants and humans. That if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school.

I had no reply. I had made a mistake. There was no fight in me, only embarrassment at my error. I did not have the words to defend myself. He signed me up for General Botany and other intro classes, and I was dismissed to get my photo taken for registration. I didn’t think about it at the time, but it was happening all over again. An echo of my grandfather’s first day at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where he was ordered to leave everything behind; language, culture, family, and the land. The adviser made me doubt where I came from, what I knew, and claimed that his was the right way to think. Only he didn’t cut my hair off.

And yes, as it turns out, there is a good biophysical explanation for why asters and goldenrod grow together. It’s a matter of aesthetics and of ecology.

Asters (purple) & Goldenrod (yellow). Source: https://flickr.com/photos/14922165@N00/20985764433

Those complementary colors of gold and purple are opposites on the color wheel. Growing together, both receive more visits from bees and other pollinators than they would if they were growing alone. It’s a testable hypothesis—a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty. Why is the world so beautiful? is a question I hope we are all exploring.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

Color perception in humans relies on banks of specialized receptor cells, the rods and cones in the retina. The cone cells absorb the light of different wavelengths and pass it on to the brain’s visual cortex for interpretation. The human eye has three kinds of cone cells. One excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths, one is tuned to blue, and the other perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow.

Wade A and Benjamin A (2013) How Do We See Color?. Front Young Minds. 1:10. doi: 10.3389/frym.2013.00010 http://www.kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2013.00010

Our eyes are so sensitive to these wavelengths that the cones can get flooded and pour over onto the other cells. A print-maker I know showed me that if you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a white sheet of paper, you will see it, for a moment, as violet. This phenomenon, the colored afterimage, occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which Asters and Goldenrod knew well before we did.

The question of Asters and Goldenrod was of course just symbolic of what I really wanted to know. I wanted to understand the relationships, the connections, to see the threads that hold us all together. I wanted to know why we love the world. Why the most ordinary meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.

Shifting Worldviews

[…]

My first plant science class was a disaster. I barely scraped by with a C. There were times when I wanted to quit. But the more I learned about plants, the more fascinated I became with their intricate structures and photosynthesis. Companionship between asters and goldenrod was never mentioned, but I was mesmerized by plant ecology, evolution, taxonomy, physiology, soils, and fungi. All around me were my teachers, the plants. Gratefully, I also found good mentors who were warm and kind professors doing heart-driven science.

My Indigenous worldview had taught me to look for relationships and understand the threads that connect the world. To join instead of divide. But the path of science trained me to separate, to break things down to their smallest parts, to focus on evidence and logic.

After years of university education and three degrees, I became a professor. My work took me to plant communities far from the asters and goldenrod. I remember feeling as if I finally understood plants. I too began to teach the mechanics of botany, following the scientific approach that I had been taught. I was teaching the names of plants but ignoring their songs.

Wisdom of the Elders

To walk the science path, I had stepped off the path of Indigenous knowledge and shifted my worldview. But the world has a way of guiding our steps. I received an invitation to a small gathering of Native elders to talk about the traditional knowledge of plants.

I will never forget—a Navajo woman without a day of university botany training in her life—spoke for hours, and I hung on every word. One by one, name by name, she told of the plants in her valley. Where each one lived, when they bloomed, who they liked to live near, and all their relationships—who ate them, who lined their nests with their fibers, what kind of medicine they offered. She also shared the stories held by those plants, their origin myths, how they got their names, and what they have to tell us. She spoke of beauty.

Her words woke me up to what I had known back when I was picking strawberries. Her knowledge was so much deeper and wider and engaged all the human ways of understanding. She could have explained asters and goldenrod.

It was a turning point. It made me remember those things that walking the science path had attempted to make me forget. The knowledge of these elders was so whole and rich and nurturing. I wanted to do everything I could to bring those ways of knowing back into harmony.

Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in Indigenous ways of knowing we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. When I began my training as a scientist, I came to understand that science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways of knowing: mind and body. But it is a whole human being, all four aspects of us, who finds the beautiful path.

That September pairing of purple and gold is that the beauty of one illuminates the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, Indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other?

I circled right back to where I had begun, to the question of beauty. Back to the questions that science does not ask. Not because they aren’t important but because science’s way of knowing is too narrow for the task.

I remembered to pay deep attention to the living world, not only their names but also their songs. Having heard those songs, I feel a deep responsibility to share them. To see if in some way, the songs and our stories could help people fall in love with the world again.