Comatose Beauty
What if Sleeping Beauty never woke up? Nobody would watch that film, no matter how attractive or talented the star actress might be. It would be boring.
Let’s face it: plants are boring too, and in the same exact way that an eternally sleeping beauty is boring.
You walk past a rose bush on your lunch break and you barely notice because it’s not blooming. A week later, you it is. But it hasn’t truly awakened, not like Briar Rose does. Yes, our rose may be more beautiful now, but she’ll never kiss you back.
This is a book I am writing about plants. But plants don’t talk. They don’t move. They don’t think. They are comatose.
Those are some tough handicaps to overcome for our leading lady. This is a problem—a serious problem—you should want resolved. How on earth will we get though a whole book about plants without falling asleep?
Here’s the good news: there’s a whole lot going on that we don’t notice. If we set a camera in front of our rose bush and record one frame every hour and then replay the frames back at 24 frames per second, we would see a much different reality. We would see a dance. The flower breathes as it opens up—not brazenly all at once—but shyly in pulses and waves. It’s sensual.
Here’s some even better news for you: I’m easily bored. Consequently, I may be wrong or silly or offensive—but I’m seldom boring. I’ll feed your brain the entertainment it craves. I will cast plants into unexpected roles, revealing, as the time-lapse trickery does, the power and benefits of plants. I will amuse while forcing you to muse.
There. We’ve dealt with problem number one. Plants are boring, but that’s mostly our own fault. Not to worry, however, we can trick our brains into making plants fascinating and, perhaps, funny.
But our second problem is far more frightening.