In Praise of Leaves

And all manner of form.

This plant is vanilla, an orchid, growing up a tree at Fairchild Botanical Garden, where I spent a few verdant hours recently while visiting family in Miami. The day was sunny, the sky clear and high-blue. As I wandered through the gardens I was struck by leaves—the immense evolutionary diversity of leaves. In the photo above, I think I count six different kinds of leaves.

What I give you today is a photo essay of leaves—

broad, narrow, needle, scale-like, simple, waxy, thin, ragged,

large, small, pinnate, bipinnate, lobed, lanceolate, circular,

parallel-veined, net-veined, palmate, undulate, revolute, umbrella-like,

obovate, crenate, pubescent, glabrous, unifoliate, spotted,

tripinnate, toothed, serrated, elliptic, linear, deltoid, like sabers,

delicate, leathery, fragrant, trifoliate, serrulate,

ovate, dentate, compound, alternate, opposite, whorled.

That garden broke me wide open. At first I was giddy, then tired, then a kind of manic, and finally something began to loosen inside me.

We got to a section called a cloud forest, and then an orchidarium, and the path was overgrown with vegetation reaching toward us—everywhere green trees and branches and vines and stems reached up and out, and sometimes they had the most exotic and beautiful flowers imaginable. I was reminded of my trip as a young woman to the wilds of Costa Rica.

Something came over me. It was so great that it erased everything else, worries and strife. Soon I was weeping.

Maybe it was the oxygen. Maybe it was the beauty. Maybe it was that I got a tiny moment to rest. Maybe I got to see the world restored.

No matter. There was that fullness, that hope, that glorious delivery of the soul of the world right to me.

I decided then that, in the years I have left, I’m going to turn my yard into a jungly botanical garden, as full of plants as I can get it.

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Here’s a bonus photo of Raven, my husband, and me resting among the Plant People, listening to trees, grounding, and drinking deeply of the botanical oxygen.