The Seed's Eye View

Here is a brief excerpt--the opening lines, actually--of an essay, "Secrets of the seed bank: Tiny clues to a landscape's past and future," by Thomas Rosburg, assistant biology professor at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

In a very basic sense, there seem to be two sides to the world of nature. One is conspicuous, visible to us as a hawk waltzing with the wind high above, a noisy katydid making a chlorophyll sandwich out of big bluestem leaves, or the deep jug-o-rum from the baritone voice of bullfrogs in an oxbow wetland. As long as we open our senses, we find this side of nature all around us.
The other side of nature is all around us, too, but in a world that is much less conspicuous. It's the leaf miner tunneling through the heart of a sunflower leaf, or the tangle of fungal threads penetrating and feeding on a decaying log, or the community of dormant plant seeds tucked away in the soil beneath our feet.

Because of its lack of visibility, this side of nature is more difficult to appreciate and understand, but it is not any less important.

Thanks to Cynthia Kurtz for the reference (more about Cynthia's ideas in another post). The full Rosburg essay is available at the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation.