Riley Black (St Martin’s Press (US, available now; UK, later this month))
The behaviour of plants is invisible to the naked human eye. They operate on timescales our imaginations can’t entertain, and they run roughshod over familiar categories of self, other and community. I confess that I find them boring.
Luckily, others don’t – Riley Black, a palaeontologist and an occasional New Scientist contributor, for one. Wandering among (or is it through?) a 14,000-year-old aspen clone, a single organism made up of thousands of stems, she wonders, how “many living things have alighted on, chewed up, dwelled within, pushed over, and otherwise had a brush with a tree so enduring it probably understands the nature of time better than I ever will”?
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The above comes from her new book, When the Earth Was Green: Plants, animals, and evolution’s greatest romance. It is a paean to plants in the form of a series of vignettes showing how they co-evolved with animals, each account separated from its neighbours by millions, tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of years.
It isn’t as immediately startling as Black’s 2022 book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, which I described in these pages as “palaeontology written with the immediacy of natural history”. It is a worthy successor, though.
Riley excels at conveying life’s precarity. Life doesn’t recover after extinction events, nor does it regenerate. It reinvents itself. Early on – 425 million years ago, to be exact – we find life flourishing in strange lands, under skies so short of oxygen, fires can only smoulder and dead plants can’t decompose.
When oxygen levels rise, existing insect species grow gigantic in a desperate (and, ultimately, losing) battle to elude the toxic effects. After an asteroid brings the Cretaceous Period to a fiery end, 66 million years ago, we find surviving plant species innovating unexpected relationships with their remaining pollinators. Eventually, parts of the planet grew so verdant that some plant species could abandon photosynthesis entirely and simply parasitise their neighbours.
Life doesn't recover after extinction events, nor does it regenerate. It reinvents itself
Adaptation is a double-edged sword in such a changeable world. It allows you to take full advantage of today’s ecosystems, but how will you cope with tomorrow’s? As Black points out, staying unspecialised has allowed the ginkgo tree to survive catastrophe 66 million years ago and persist for millions and millions of years.
Black allows her imagination full rein. As she envisions wandering through a dense, humid, prehistoric forest where “millipedes grow more than six feet long and alligator-size amphibians silently watch the shoreline for unwary insects”, it is easy to forget how rigorous and topical the underlying research is. (The millipede, Arthropleura, was discovered only three years ago.)
Her extensive endnotes do explain the limits of our current knowledge and the logic behind her rare fancies. These passages are integral and include some of Black’s most insightful writing.
Above all, this is a book about how animals and plants shape each other. When animals large enough to knock over trees without even noticing disappeared, forests grew denser, with a continuous overstory that gave even the largest of creatures a third dimension to explore.
Those thick forests forced the surviving mammals and the few dinosaurs left into novel shapes and, even more importantly, novel behaviours. Both classes learned to spend more time with their young. And, if we are prepared to cherry-pick our mammalian examples, we can just about say that both learned to fly.
When the Earth Was Green may be too cutesy for some. The sight of a couple of sabre-toothed cats rolling about in a patch of catnip will either enchant you or it won’t. Early on in the book, you may wince at the idea of a tree “understanding time”. Perhaps all writers who engage with plants suffer this fate: the rhetorical tools they reach for date far faster than the science.
That said, this is an excellent work. I still think plants are boring, and would happily pulp the lot of them to make books as fascinating as this one.
Simon Ings is a writer based in London
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