The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth.
The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth.
By Stephen Harrod Buhner
Pg 164-65
Plant Chemistry and the Soil
After a plant disperses its seeds, in the colder latitudes, the seasons begin to change. Trees and other perennials begin pulling chemistries out of their leaves, storing them in their trunks and roots for future use. About half of the leaf chemistry is retrieved; the leaves begin to change color in response.64 The annuals die altogether, having sent their life onward in their seeds. All these dying leaves and plants come to rest on and in the soil, creating a thick blanket of plant matter. Not all this plant “litter” is dieback, of course; a consistent portion is living leaves, limbs, lichens, and trees that for one reason or another fall to the ground.
Top“Living litter” is much more highly active in its chemistry than dieback. The trees and plants continue to hydraulically pump up water from deep in the Earth and release it through their stomata, forming clouds, and then it rains.
Rain percolates through the thick bed of plant matter that is restingon top of the soil and, like water through the coffee grounds in a coffee filter, leaches the chemistries from the plant matter into the soil. The lumpy shape of the Earth allows water to accumulate in standing pools filled with leaves and old plants and twigs and here the chemicals concentrate in strength—like a tea that has been left steeping. All of the plant litter releases its chemistries into the soil at varying rates depending on what kinds of plants it is from and what kinds of compounds are in it.
TopThe soil then separates out and routes the thousands of carbon chemistries being deposited into it.Many of these substances, such as flavonoids, degraded lignin, terpenes, lignans, and tannins recombine to form humus—what we primarily think of as dirt (though dirt actually includes as well the billions of other organisms that live within it).
Humus is mostly two substances, humic acid and a combination of polysaccharides or sugar molecules. No one knows how humic acid forms, but once formed it acts like a living substance and possesses a number of unique characteristics. It forms crystals, much like snowflakes in a sense, and, like snowflakes, no identical ones have ever been found. Humic acid “uncouples” many plant compounds, separating them into their constituent chemistries, detoxifying them, and keeping the soil fertile.
Top67 As well, it stores the separated chemistries it has received within itself as stable complexes where it can, when inputs from the ecosystem indicate the necessity, recombine them into needed compounds and rerelease them into the ecosystem. Humic acid acts, I n essence, much like a storage battery for the plants’ complex chemistries. As long as the plants are promiscuously producing compounds that regularly fall in a resource cascade to the ground, the battery remains full, the soil rich and bountiful.Through tightly coupled feedback processes information on the chemistry reserves stored in humic acid feeds back into the aboveground plant communities, indicating what plants should grow in what combination in what ecosystem and what kinds of chemistries they should produce to keep the soil healthy.(This is why it is not possible to increase soil fertility through human action.
TopUnless interfered with, the soil in natural ecosystems is always at maximum fertility. To increase soil fertility at one location means that ecological resources have to be taken from someplace else. Soil fertility is temporarily increased at one location by decreasing it in another. This is not even a zero-sum game. The removal of ecosystem resources in that one location causes a diminishment of its functional community, from which it cannot recover except over very long time spans. Earth’s plant communities have been doing their job for at least500 million years; only extreme hubris would lead us to believe we could do better through an agricultural science not even one hundred years old. Mimicry of the natural dynamics of plant communities would seem a better and clearly more sustainable approach.
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