For the Bakongo people of Central Africa, and many across the diaspora, the cosmogram represents the movement of all things through space and time. The multifaceted diagram illustrates how everything that exists travels along a cyclical path of being. It consists (in most depictions) of a cross-divided circle, with each division a different color, and counterclockwise arrows. These divisions represent the “four positions of the sun”—conception, birth, maturity, and death. By the time the first humans started their feet beyond conception, the first position, and into the world, about 200,000 years ago, plants had already endured lifetimes. Estimates say the first plant arose around 850 million years ago, when an alga swallowed cyanobacteria and the resulting composite being gained the ability to store sunlight as energy.
Given their approximate age, this means that plants have lived through every Ice Age; witnessed every extinction event; seen every ancient civilization rise at dawn and turn to dust; seen huts, yurts, adobes, camps, shacks, houses, pavilions, pagodas, skyscrapers, palaces and places of faith or power rise, desiccate, crumble, and join the aggregates of dunes and windward storms; watched every season pass through at the latitudes and altitudes in which they found themselves able to acclimate; seen mass migrations of all animals, wars of one kind of animal, that same animal’s burials, children’s games, children’s burials, feasts, dancing, famines, people in love, people in pain, in lust, in loss, becoming lost, losing themselves, losing their breaths—some for a moment, some a stretch, but all of them, eventually, forever; seen the atmosphere burn, freeze, shimmer, swelter; watched landscapes bloom, burn, burst, fracture, fall away; have been stripped and scattered by wind, lacerated by sand, saturated in rain, in mist or fog, choking in smog, exhaust, several billion signatures of hydrocarbon smoke and trillions more in emissive chemical reactions not seen before the rise of people; seen themselves expand into organisms the size of large cities or cut down in swaths far larger for the benefit of those large cities; watched as mountains rose, collapsed; earthquakes sheared and shattered, swallowing themselves; seen continents fracture, form, drift, and collide; watched the sea returning, again and again, bleaching the shore; tsunamis and typhoons returning, again and again; infernos, cyclones, blizzards, monsoons—and people—returning, again and again.
The story of plants is also the story of people. We are grafted to one another. But who is the rootstock and who is the scion? Who provides the stable base, the roots and stem? Who, the fruit, leaves, seeds, and flowers? While humans have learned how to cultivate plants, the focus of this series casts its gaze upon plants as the chief agent of entanglement, responsible for uniting, dividing, and complicating the relationships between themselves, other beings, including us, and geographies over time. This includes how we interweave plants into our culture, our myths and nightmares, and how their embrace is just as palpable. It is also about how plants are ceaseless witnesses and catalysts of our lives, whether around us, beside us, on or inside (and through) us. On this basis, plants are presented here as the rootstock and we, their scion. They are far older than we are, and without them in the world there would be no us, if indeed any life at all. Omnivore, carnivore, herbivore, insectivore, fructivore, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan—none would survive without the vegetal world. The half of a graft which has no root will quickly perish on its own. Of course, while this applies to humans as well, it is also true that we are scions to other kinds of graft. We, in our all-too-aware cleverness, import the graft of grift; of gripping, hoarding, cultivating, curating, stockpiling, piling up, hiding, lingering about, culling, dividing, divining, cherishing, discarding, or tearing asunder. This cleverness has, over the centuries, given birth to life-extending (and for some, enriching) technologies with one hand, and disrupted the balance between plants and people and planet, increasingly with devastating, even irreversible, consequences, with the other. Yet before this outsized reach of bipedal mammals with enduringly complex brains tested (and breached beyond) our boundaries, plants had long since entangled the world within their lengths. When Wattieza, a fernlike tree—considered the first of its kind—first released spores into the atmosphere, the only continents were Laurussia (now most of so-called North America and Europe) and Gondwana (the landmass of present-day South America, Africa, India, Asia, Australia, Antarctica, and smaller parts of North America). This was 380 million years ago.
Monodora myristica, calabash nutmeg, must have perfumed the air throughout the forests of Benin for generations before those strange and fateful ships began to arrive from across the Bight of Benin at the West African nation’s southern coast in the mid-1700s. Before Audre Lorde would visit and write poems about Dahomey (French Dahomey between 1894 and 1958 the Republic of Dahomey until 1975 when the country adopted its current name), before the Dahomey kingdom themselves, all those fires and flags raised before them; millennia before their hominid ancestors arrived from southern lands, laying their eyes upon the first of these specimens. Those first eyes like-but-not-quite-like-ours that met the calabash nutmeg’s wide-lobed foliage, its pendulous orchidlike flowers—a frilled, speckled, bicolor trefoil—and large seeds thrice the size of their Indonesian cousins, Myristica fragrans, arrived when neither tree nor person knew what it was to be owned or said to belong to an imagined place called nation. Rewind the seasons further. Before calabash nutmegs themselves, to their ancestors—ancient lianas—forming in embryonic forests, and which will, over millions of years, develop the ability to produce fruit as a means of reproduction.
Tauraco persa, the Guinea turaco, who regularly stuff their gullets with several fig varieties (Ficus) also growing in the Beninois forests, likely witnessed Monodora’s vast millennia-old habitat shrink in a matter of centuries as human development pushed it back to the edges of the nation’s rivers. Spores and leaves of all kinds had taken to the air long before the turaco’s bright green plumage marked regular transits from Senegal east and southward, down as far as the coasts of northern Angola. The story of plants is the story of birds, too. Both trees—Ficus and Monodora myristica—were eventually poached and taken to the so-called New World, with the fig finding contentment with mainland temperate climates and the calabash nutmeg persisting in the Caribbean. Prior to their seeds crossing the Atlantic in the hair of stolen African women, okra, or Abelmoschus esculentus, were neighbors of the two trees throughout West Africa, but also thrived in parts of East Africa, as well as South Asia and Southeast Asia. By the time I was born in 1976, in the city of my birth, Atlanta, okra had been here for nearly 400 years. Beetle-pollinated cycads, also here, had by then already witnessed the upwellings of magma no less than 300 million years ago, some of which hardened and created Stone Mountain to the east and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the north. But they were not alone. Epiphytic fronds clung to some of the first conifers. Club mosses and Equisetales, horsetails, ran rampant. Nelumbo lutea, the so-called American lotus, rose and set and rose again like floating satellites over the swampy waters of a continent that had no name (or people with words to name it) for ninety-nine percent of its existence. Each of these plants were present and privy to the best and worst of human endeavors. Some became passengers, whether by will or by accident. Some were stowaways, and others, unintended hosts. The entanglement, however, remains the same. The story of plants is—and always will be—the story of people.