Introduction What greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered worke, set with Orient pearles and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels? -- John Gerard. Herbal, 1597 If the world's plants suddenly expired, we would have no tomorrow. Yet it is easy to dismiss plants as the silent witnesses to our progress on the planet. The world nurtures between 250,000 and 300,000 types of flowering plants and they can seem like a pretty backcloth to our remorseless activity: walking a dog through a forest of quiet oaks; driving a car past purple fields of lavender; riding the train across a prairie of wheat. PLANTS AND PEOPLE In reality, plants have played a dynamic role in shaping our history. Life on Earth is made possible by the very breath of plants, by the way they absorb carbon dioxide (C02) and exhale oxygen. Plants may have even paved the way for us, evolving the process of photosynthesis in response to some prehistoric climate catastrophe and opening the DNA gates for the evolution of terrestrial animals like ourselves. Grains of pollen frozen beneath the Antarctic ice may yet reveal the secrets of our Earth's own past.
They could help predict its future too, solving the puzzle over whether the current hole in the ozone layer, attributed to our use of fossil fuels, was prefigured millions of years ago. Plant history is certainly longer than ours. While plants have been colonizing the planet for 470 million years, our own timeline is huddled into a relatively recent past. If every century counted as a minute on the face of a clock, the Romans conquered Europe twenty minutes ago; Christianity was founded less than a quarter of an hour back; and the first white people only settled in America in the time it takes to turn the beans of Coffea arabica into a decent cup of coffee. Plants have always provided us with fuel, food, shelter, and medicines. They have always controlled the rate of land erosion and regulated the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the air that we breathe. They have given us the fossil fuels that we are consuming with such profligacy and they have inspired us to build national botanical gardens, to go garden visiting, and to spend small for tunes on cultivating our own back yard plant collections. We have self-harmed on plants too, overeating sugar, dosing up on natural narcotics, over indulging in alcohol.
An overweight Durban housewife might rue the day that sugar (p.166) was first refined; an inebriate in Adelaide might blame his sorrows on barley (p.104), while some poor patient in a Cincinnati cancer ward could hold tobacco (p.136) responsible for his condition. On the other hand, we can rejoice in a cup of tea (p.26), celebrate with a glass of wine (see Wine Grape, p.202) or simply drink in the scent of the sweet pea (p.118) and the rose (p.
162). FRAGILE EARTH This is a good time to look at how plants have altered the history of our life on Earth and how they continue to play a pivotal role. We are taking liberties with our plants and, in doing so, with planet Earth. It cannot continue. By consuming the fossil fuels that were made from plants and destroying the plants that make up the rainforests we are, according to the paleoclimatology scientist Professor David Beerling, "undertaking a global uncontrolled experiment guaranteed to alter the climate for future generations. Plants . are a major factor in the environmental drama of global warming now as they have been in the recent and more distant past" ( The Emerald Planet , 2007). The perils of destroying our plants could alter the course of history forever.