🕸️ Look at this mesh!
Down in the soil, there is an ancient relationship between plants and mycorrhizal fungi. It’s the Wood Wide Web. Robert Macfarlane writes:
The fungi siphon off food from the trees, taking some of the carbon-rich sugar that they produce during photosynthesis. The plants, in turn, obtain nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi have acquired from the soil, by means of enzymes that the trees do not possess.
The implications of the Wood Wide Web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi, however. The fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources—sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus—between one another. A dying tree might divest itself of its resources to the benefit of the community, for example, or a young seedling in a heavily shaded understory might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbors. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send one another warnings. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it…
The revelation of the Wood Wide Web’s existence, and the increased understanding of its functions, raises big questions—about where species begin and end; about whether a forest might be better imagined as a single superorganism, rather than a grouping of independent individualistic ones; and about what trading, sharing, or even friendship might mean among plants.
Industrial revolution,
assembly lines,
workflows,
timelines –
thin overlays
on the real world
of mesh
where there is no such thing
as a straight line
It’s not just the trees. Life, the universe, everything – it’s all mesh.
Try to understand the soil your growth springs from.
Bôa formed in London in the 90s. They released two albums. Recently the internet got excited about them and they decided to get back together and make some new music, a good idea, I think.
Grow slowly
Jeff
Of all the gin joints! Last night I literally just read this precise factoid Chapter 9 of The Light Eaters! The entire book is stuffed with examples of plant “behavior” (which is finally not such a dirty word as it’s been for the last 50 years!) “The amino acids glutamate and glycine, important neurotransmitters in our brains and spines that are recently understood to be important to plant signaling, actually pass between plants and fungi at the junctures where the two connect.”* It’s hard not to look outside and not see the mesh all around me now!
*Zoë Schlanger by way of Suzanne W. Simard’s “Mycorrhizal Networks…” 2018
The mesh of/is God. No joke!