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Fairy Work
by Chet Raymo
Yesterday I pulled the yellow flowers off the few dandelions in our
grassy garden before they went to seed. Today, a few more yellow
flowers. I'm always astonished that a dandelion can make a flower
overnight.
Make a flower out of atoms of mostly carbon, oxygen
and hydrogen, resources drawn from the soil and air. Overnight, while
we slept, the plant was moving around and arranging all those atoms --
something like 100000000000000000000000 atoms, by my rough calculation,
as many atoms as there are tablespoons of water in all the world's oceans
-- ray florets, bracts. A pigment -- a carotene? -- for that golden
color. All those boxy chlorophyl molecules with a magnesium heart and a
long tail (where do they find the magnesium? oh, well, the entire
country is green). Finding, shifting, arranging, under the direction of
dandelion DNA. And in the morning -- presto! -- a flower head ready to
open in the sun.
I've mentioned before that we live on "The
Fairies Road" here in the west of Ireland. There was a time, not so
long ago, when country folks believed that the little people who lived
under the hill were busy at night, stealing tools from the garden, milk
from the cow, babies from the cradle. No fairies are more nocturnally
industrious than the never-ceasing busyness of life itself, cleverly
arranging 100000000000000000000000 atoms into a golden flower -- that I
will pull off in the afternoon and toss away.
Fairy Work by
Chet Raymo is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 United States License.
Based on a work at
www.sciencemusings.com.
Image courtesy of Dawn Endico at flickr.com.
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