Leaves

When a writer I admire expresses spirited admiration for the work of another, I pay attention. As it does each year, the Guardian asked some 70 writers and literary types to name their favorite books of 2007. Of course, many choices are trifling and dishonest, predictably judged by political not literary values. Some are pure posing or remarkable bad taste – Cormac McCarthy? Kerouac? Rowling? Shameful. In contrast, here is part of Oliver Sacks’ reply:

“My favourite non-fiction book this year has been David Beerling's The Emerald Planet (Oxford), a minutely argued but highly readable history of the last half-billion years on earth. The story Beerling tells could not have been put together even 10 years ago, for it depends on the latest insights from palaeontology, climate science, genetics, molecular biology and chemistry, all brilliantly and beautifully integrated.”

Daily, at my office, I read the prose of engineers and scientists, and much of it is nearly as clotted and jargon-ridden as that produced by their confreres in the humanities. Sacks is a neurologist and an elegant writer – an unlikely pairing of gifts. Beerling is a professor of paleobiology at the University of Sheffield, and his prose is also stylishly transparent. I have only just started reading his book, which bears the subtitle How Plants Changed Earth’s History, but find it compulsively readable. Here’s a passage from Chapter 2, “Leaves, Genes, and Greenhouse Gases”:

“If we start the clock ticking from the appearance of the first vascular plant Cooksiana and stop it when large leaves become widespread, we can see the whole affair is bracketed by a 40-50-million-year-thick slice of geological time, within the accepted dating uncertainties. It is genuinely puzzling why it took plants such an inordinately long time to come up with what, on the face of it, is a rather simple evolutionary innovation, and why when it did arrive it took an age to become widespread throughout the floras of the day. Consider, for example, that humans evolved from primates in a tenth of the time. Come to that, mammals sprang from being furtive bit-part players in the game of life to their present diversity and dominance in the 65 million years since the dinosaurs famously went extinct.”

Such writing is more difficult to do than it might appear. Beerling poses a scientific riddle, one of immense dimensions and significance, simply but without egregious oversimplification.
He helps us comprehend the time scale involved by putting it in the context of human and mammal evolution. I could have done without the cliché of the ticking clock, but otherwise the passage is admirably and memorably clear. I will remember the unusually protracted evolution of the leaf. Incidentally, aiding memorization was central to the discipline of classical rhetoric.

Here’s another of Beerling’s virtues, part scientific, part literary: As the mention of greenhouse gases suggests, his research into paleobotany involves issues that are growing increasingly contentious and politicized. A lot of people, many of them ill-informed and self-righteous, have come to premature conclusions about global warming and related phenomena. Based on what I’ve read thus far, Beerling is not among them. He is obviously excited about his research and able to communicate his enthusiasm for botanical fossils to readers who may never have thought about them before. He and his prose are animated, but the animation doesn’t go to his head and override scientific rigor. Sacks, as usual, is right.

At the same time I’m reading Beerling I’ve been reading Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses (2003), a selection from the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge (1908-1994). The translation, from Anvil Poetry Press, is by Robin Fulton, the Scottish poet and editor. As the title suggests, Hauge’s work spans the natural and human worlds. The black-and-white cover photograph, by Fulton, is striking and stark, like many of Hauge’s poems: A slender tree bent to the snow-covered ground. It reminds us that “dendron” and “dendrology” share etymological roots. Getting back to leaves, here’s one of Hauge’s many tree poems, “Leaves Loosen”:

“Let him have them,
thinks the birch, and
gives the wind free play

“with yellow leaves –
left standing naked
and cold in thin twigs.

“Nothing like it,
being poor,
no better

“place to stand on
than bare rock
either.

“The oak naked now too
but not poor.
Wisely sucked out

“strength from leaves before
letting them one
by one go,

“has long since been asleep
under grey bark,
knuckled branches

“poking in the night
for stars,
and the roots pierce deep

“in sheltering mould.”