Natural Inheritance

Plants are very familiar. They tend to be taken for granted and regarded with placid affection rather than with the facination and interest they deserve. For most people they are part of the view, whether open country, farmland, or townscapes with street trees. Yet they are unique among the organisms with which we share this planet, for they alone contain the pigment chlorophyll which allows them to derive their energy from light.

Outwardly, "they toil not, neither do they spin", but inwardly they are highly active and amazingly complex chemical-producing factories. There is more than one view of plants. To the more comfortably off they include garden or park plants for leisure and pleasure, and the indoor pot plants which provide for town dwellers that contact with the green wild world that seems to be an instinctive need.

By contrast, many people in developing countries depend heavily on plants, but look at them hardly at all from the standpoint of beauty or solace. Crops are there to be cultivated, often with extreme sweat and toil, and wild plants to be exploited directly. The overwhelming need for fuelwood and grazing for animals is often totally unselective.

We use plants in every field of life and have long ceased to rely on those native to our own area. the average Northerner has foods, products, jand material contributed by p0lants from all over the world, many grown far from their original homelands ~ exotic hardwoods from the tropics for flooring and garden furniture, fruit and vegetables from around the world, insecticides from Chrysanthemums, medicine from the Himalayan opium poppy or the Andean coca, spices from the East, dyes from Asia, polishes from the jungle, toiletries from jojoba, grown in the desert!.. ; pot plants from the tropics, oils from the Mediterranean Olive; Soya from Brazil; cotton, sisal, rubber ~ the list is almost endless.

Not very long ago, the plant world seemed inexhaustible, always reasonably renewable. Today it is all too clear it is not. Nevertheless, we continue to wrench plants from the ground or destroy their environment without giving back to nature what nature gives to us!.. and, whether for reasons of pressing immediate need or.. for greed, eradicate natural plant life as we do so. It's a sad fact that few people, whether the local tiller of soil or the modern entrepreneur, have any real regard for the world of plants, either for the plants' sake or for their own.