A Naturalist at Large by Holmes Rolston III

The Pasqueflower Natural History 88 No. 4, April, 1979, pp. 6-16 “ The chance to find [one]," wrote A Ido Leopold, "is a right as inalienable as free speech"

Earliest among the rites of the west­ in and against the wild. So I venture this biological phenomenon becomes a ern spring is the blossoming of the here to let the meeting of it take a philo­ metaphor for all the striving toward pasqueflower, which, like the eastern sophical turn. fruition that characterizes the psycho­ arbutus, precedes by a month the rest Winter in the Rockies is too much logical, intellectual, cultural, and even of the vernal flora. Its precocious a still and lifeless scene, save for, or the spiritual levels of life. beauty accounts for its name, a flower yet more truly because of, the howling Flowering adds the splendor of art of the Pasque, Easter; and its loveli­ wind. The beauty is of icy peaks, glis­ to our often rather more mean thoughts ness, size, and season led Aldo tening snowfields, crystalline flakes, concerning the evolution of life, for the Leopold to introduce his Sand County gaunt aspen, the somber hues of li­ flowers in the jungle fit their bearers for Almanac with the plea that “the chens on weathered granite. The sea­ survival and yet also reveal how life chance to find a pasqueflower is a right sonal green is gone, and only the coni­ pushes toward a level of living beauty as inalienable as free speech.” Re­ fers preserve it with dark coolness, that exceeds all precedent in the non­ cently, just after the equinox, hiking a their branches pruned back by the flowering wilderness. We love the meadow in the foothills of the Rockies, weight of the snows. Winter is all of landscape, the sunset, the night sky; I delighted in thousands in finest frozen beauty, Mother Nature hiber­ yet greatly exceeding the geophysical, bloom, with nothing else out save the nates; by the time of the equinox we mineralogical, and celestial ranges of aspen catkins. tire and hope for the “ spring” of life. beauty.are those of the emergent struc­ Its finding is a joy immediately in the The pasqueflower symbolizes all tures of life, particularly as these come aesthetic encounter, but beyond that, that is missing in the wintry landscape, to their botanical apogee in the flowers this windflower is a cherished symbol and should there come a spring without of the higher plants, which so marvel­ of the wild for reasons that run deeper. the regeneration it prefigures, the ously combine function and beauty, as In its annual renewal as the first spirited winter would have grown lethal. though to mark life’s reproduction with flowering against the blasts of winter, Wildness without its flora would be a special sign. it is a sign against the eternal storm. only the bleak and conquering storm, Other plants flower more simply, as Like the daffodil in Shakespeare’s and it is this florescence that the pasque­ with the hundred thousand aspen cat­ England, the pasqueflower dares to flower helps us to celebrate because kins that I passed with the thousands “ take the winds of March with it dares to bloom when the winter of of pasqueflowers, but even these wind- beauty,” and such a brave flower can which we have wearied is not yet gone. pollinated flowers or the ferns and help us ponder what it means to live “ Flowering” touches values so soon; mosses, which do not properly flower at all, still bear reproductive structures that, when looked at more nearly, amply enrich the phenomenon of flo­ rescence. Flowering, whether great or small, is a many-splendored thing, cir­ cling round the pageant of life that per­ ennially springs from the latent earth. The brilliance of this pasqueflower has its simplest explanations in mecha­ nisms for flowering so soon at the winter’s end. It must have petals (or, as the botanists prefer, petallike sepals) large enough to attract the few insects that are out so early. The downy sur­ face of transparent hairs on its palmate leaves and stem insulates and also, as do those of the pussy willows, allows a radiation heating to temperatures high enough for development, provid­ ing a miniature greenhouse effect. The same coat probably also protects the pasqueflower from unneeded radia­ tion, although it needs much light and cannot grow in the shade, and the hairs help in its water economy. The energy stored in its root system The pasqueflower, too, when it passefleur, passe being but a half- is drawn upon for its spring growth, bursts forth with the breaking up of the translated form of Pasch, going back and the hollow stem seems to permit raging winter, is such a reminder of through the Greek pascha to the He­ its rapid growth and to allow both its life’s survival, indeed of a prospering brew pesach. bending before the wind and a turning such that it hopes for paradise. After Whatever its antiquity, we might of its floral head to face the spring sun. the flood, the winter, this earth will first think, that association has no natu­ By the last adaptation it gains enough always come round again to its garden ral basis; it is entirely fictional. But we solar energy to keep the floral parts season, to bring us somehow nearer to later find connections that are so funda- operating efficiently. Its sap has a low its ultimate natural significance, even mental—biologically, psycholog­ freezing point, and all its parts are to the sacred character of life in its ically, and even theologically—that soaked with an acrid irritant, which struggling beauty. We begin to see we are hardly aware of them. It is no discourages foraging deer and elk. why it is so inalienable a right to be coincidence that Easter comes with the This rose has its poison thorns. able to find in the dusty earth this draft spring; the energies of Easter belong This is survival through winter, to be of beauty. with the energies of spring. The vernal sure, but the pasqueflower helps me to The natural character that we now lily is more than an artificial symbol, glimpse something more, the skill of celebrate comes through even its scien­ it is a natural emblem of life springing art superimposed on the science of sur­ tific name, Pulsatilla patens. It is “ sha­ up anew out of a wintry death, and so vival. This is exuberance in the funda­ ken” (pulsatus) by the incessant too with those other symbols of life’s mental, etymological sense of being winds, and of diminutive form ( ilia), reproductive powers—lambs, eggs, more than expectedly luxuriant. Does while yet “ spreading broadly” rabbits, and even the ladies parading in not such an encouraging beauty speak (patens) its brandished petals. John their fetching dresses and bonnets— of that face of nature that overleaps the Gerard wrote in his 1597 Herbal that that sometimes seem so flippant beside merest hanging on to life to bear the the “ passe floure is called commonly the sobriety of the grave and the hope winds of the storm with vigorous, in Latine Pulsatilla.” Botanists have for more. adorning beauty? Nor is it just the often placed Pulsatilla in the genus The death of Jesus was not inciden­ grand petals of delicate purple whorled Anemone, that genus going back to the tally at the Passover, and centuries about the yellow stamens and pistils, Greek word for “ windflower,” but later, the missionary church, moved by for the fingered involucre frames the most prefer to separate it out owing to forces it did not wholly understand, su­ flower so well, and the villous coat has the tails of the achenes, which become perimposed its annual memorial of the a sheen that, seen backlighted by the so greatly elongated as it sows those new covenant onto the “ pagan” rites sun, gives a lustrous aura to comple­ villous seeds on the very winds that of spring that preceded Christianity in ment the gentle leafy green. blast it. Those wisps rising over the Europe. Easter is from an Indo-Euro- Butterflies drink its nectar, and if I prairie gave it another name—the ^pean root for the East, the rising sun, first reduce them to their pollinating prairie smoke. and the beloved Teutonic goddess function, 1 notice soon after their The winds have carried it virtually Eostre, whose holiday was celebrated winged beauty. The bees come too, around the north temperate world, for at the equinox. By a related insight, and I must look more closely again, to it is found in northern Europe, in the hardly less profound or subliminal, the find in their wing venation still further western two-thirds of North America, church matched its incarnation with the evidence of the art that emerges with and in the Siberian Orient. Further, winter solstice and the pagan rejoicing the architecture of life. As when we from some ancestral plant there have that the sun would begin its return strip the beauty from the melodies of evolved several closely related spe­ toward spring, this coinciding with the birds in spring or from human romantic cies. Pulsatilla is everywhere a flower birth of a Savior, love, laying bare only biochemical re­ that comes on the heels of winter and productive functions, so too here, per­ is without peer in its own environment. haps when the more is reduced to the No other flower is able so to endure the less, we refuse to let life’s production cold and, if need be, the dry, and to and rebirth become a window into spread its petals forth so boldly from life’s spirited inventiveness. But when the plains through the montane and into released so, what images indeed can the alpine. Its taxonomy, geography, the flower build in the mind! and ecology all return us to its hardy The flower gave our race its first capacity to prosper before the wind and glimpses of paradise, in the Persian the winter. walled garden from which the term The popular name further employs derives. Flowers hint of Eden to those this character, for its prevenient grace who deeply appreciate them; but earth has drawn it into association with Eas­ is a natural garden, not entirely, not in ter and the Passover, recalling in Chris­ winter, but exuberantly enough in tianity and Judaism alike the passing spring and summer that its flowering out of bondage, the passing by of recalls how life persists with appealing death, and a release into freedom and grace through the besetting storm. In newness of life. Gerard continues, the legendary days of Noah, the He­ “ They floure for the most part about brews took the rainbow for a sign after Easter, which hath mooved mee to the Flood that life would not ever be name it Pasque floure. ” But long destroyed but would survive its trage­ before, it was known in Old English dies in blessedness. as passefloure and in French as covenant of life to continue in beauty despite the storm. We come too sadly to the autumnal equinox if ever there comes a fall without its thanksgiving, making us glad for the harvest, which, remembering how there is in every root and seed a hope, makes us brave before the returning winter. Flowers cover our every grave. But is that because they mask death for a moment, before they too fade, their comfort only an illusion adorning death? I think not. They belong there because they somehow betoken to us, at levels more subconscious than we know, this florescence of life, this ca­ pacity of the germ plasm to pass through death, to persist in transient beauty over the vortex of chaos. In one of the earliest burials known to archeology, in the Shanidar cave in northern Iraq, there lay a man who was congenitally deformed, his bones amidst fossil pollen. His Neanderthal mourners had gathered grape hyacinths and bachelor’s buttons, hollyhocks and golden ragwort, and covered him with a blanket of blossoms. They cared for this cripple in life, and then found at death no better symbol than a floral tribute to communicate their hope that life would envelop death. Their passions at that grave almost make us weep, for they touch so an­ ciently this hope for the “ passing over” of death by life, a force that reaches on to the pagan Germanic Eas­ ter, on to the Semitic exodus out of winter and Egypt, on to Calvary, on to the medieval naming of the pasque­ flower, and on to beset me now. If the flower has for fifty thousand years served as an emblem of resolu­ tion in the face of death, then my Whatever meaning the conquering pasqueflower is of a piece with the rose thoughts run steady in a natural track faith added did not so much replace as of Sharon, which blooms in the desert, as perennial as the springs since Nean­ complement, enrich, and extend the and the shoot budding out of the stump derthal times. The flower is a very primitive and universal impulse in us of Jesse, for here we have an earthen powerful symbol, it has had a psycho­ to celebrate the return of the warmth gesture of the powers of resurgent life. logically elevating effect in every cul­ of spring and the resurgence of life that We have become too wise in our ture, and if anyone cares to say that this is given by these mysterious powers of own conceits if ever we let a winter is not scientific, but romantic, that does the sun. The Hebrew Passover, also solstice go by without a glance upward not make it any less real. Our recent with its lambs and eggs, was earlier to rejoice that the sun will sink no “ flower children” knew this impact transposed from a “ pagan” pastoral lower in the darkening sky, glad that when they hung flowers in protest in festival as a coming out of bondage in the shadows will not lengthen, glad the guns of destruction. Egypt blended with a deliverance from that the longest night is done. We have For longer than we can ever re­ the grip of winter. become too artificially cultured if ever member flowers have been flung up to Perhaps it may not be so fanciful but we let a vernal equinox fail to bring argue against the forces of violence and rather entirely realistic that this hope in the spring it pledges, glad that death, because that is what they do in pasqueflower should in its limited and there is more of the day than of the and of themselves, and thus they serve natural way come to serve as a symbol night, more of life and less of death. as so ready a sign for any who en­ for what Jesus in his unlimited, super­ We walk too hurriedly if ever we pass counter them in a pensive mood, natural way represents to the Christian the season’s first pasqueflower by, too wearied of the winter, frightened by mind, a hint of the release of life from busy to let its meeting stay us for a the storm, saddened by death. This is the powers that would suppress it. The quiet moment before this token of the why it is liberating to find the pasque- flower bearing with beauty the winds one the warp, the other the woof, in the character is an apt sign to be drawn into of March. weaving of what we have become. association with the passion of Easter The beauties of winter are heartless, Beyond that, all who live where the and the Pesach. Life decomposes and yet there is no deeper mystery than how pasqueflower flourishes will, when out of its throes it recomposes; it per­ life flowers because of the agonies that they have searched deeply, find how it sists in perpetual beauty while it is per­ threaten it. Environmental pressures was the cold that made our ancestors petually perishing. shape life— that is the premise of all sew garments and build fires, how it The way of nature is, in this deep biological science. Life is pressed by made them fashion an ever more insu­ though earthen sense, the Way of the the storms, but it is pressed on by the lating culture, in which dress we Cross. Light shines in the darkness that storms, and environmental necessity is proved able not only to survive but to does not overcome it. This noble the mother of invention in life. The flourish. Our human genus flowered flewer is a poignant sacrament of this, winter is a sinister maelstrom against before the winter, much as does this and to chance to find it in earliest which we fling out our curses, against pasqueflower; and once again we find spring, and to pause at that meeting, which we fling up our flowers, yet is the arts in their beauty superimposed is to find a moment of truth, a moment it chaos and otherness and nothing on the science of survival. of memory and promise. Let winters more? Or does it too belong in the sea­ This pasqueflower endures the come, life will flower on as long as sonal economy, as night complements winter in noble beauty; but itssulfering earth shall last. day, almost a sign of the unfathomable is not only the shadow of its beauty, dialectic of life with its opposite? it is among the roots that nourish it. Holmes Rolston Ill teaches philoso­ Flowers arose against the adversities That “ suffering” is metaphorical for phy and environmental ethics at Colo­ of the drought and the cold. We can this insentient flower; still, this natural rado State University in Fort Collins. only speculate about their origins, but it is axiomatic within evolutionary theory that the advanced flowers of the angiosperms conveyed some advan­ tage, perhaps the exploitation of in­ sects for better outbreeding, more ex­ perimentation for altered forms, such as the encased seed or the herbaceous habit, the better adapted against the dry or the cold. The seasonal tropical desert was perhaps more significant than the winter in the beginning, but each harshness has much in common, and the subsequent global advance of the angiosperms amply proved their ef­ fectiveness for overwintering. The feat of flowering in the spring is a reciprocal of the defeat of the “ fall,” and the floral diversification of our temperate climates is very much a product of winters alternating with summers. This pasqueflower springs forth in its particular form of early beauty as much because of the winter as to spite it; it buds and blossoms be­ cause it is blasted. Without the wind, there would be no windflowers, and without the advancing of death, there is no advancing of life. Modern man came out of the lee Age. Perhaps as the human genetic stock was exposed to the pressures of glaciation, relaxed in the interglacial ages, like winters and summers, we were made modern in this recent flowering of Indo-European civiliza­ tion. The north wind made not only the Vikings, it made us all. We do not owe every culture to the Pleistocene winter, for archaic civilizations arose in the tropics, but we owe all culture to the hostility of nature, provided only that we can keep in tension with this the support of nature that is truer still, the