Pollen on Walden Pond

Walden Pond is arguably the most famous lake in literature. It is a relatively small (61.5 acres) and deep (100 feet) kettle lake, surrounded by woodland, situated not far from Concord, Massachusetts (Maynard 2004). Between 1845 and 1847, Henry David Thoreau spent much of his time living in a tiny cabin near the Pond. While there, he watched the landscape change season by season, recorded the wildlife and plants in and around the pond, measured its water depth, and noted the changes in winter ice extent and thickness. In the fall of 1847, he left his cabin and returned to a somewhat more regular life in town. Later, he distilled these experiences into a book, published in 1854 and named Walden for the locality. In the penultimate paragraph of the penultimate chapter of his narrative, he described the Pond in spring:

Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially on cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hillsides here and there. ... The sulphur-like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrel-ful. This is the "sulphur showers" we hear of. Even in Calidas’ drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus." And so the season went rolling into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass. (Thoreau 1986:367)

His description of conifer pollen floating on the water surface is evocative and will be familiar to anyone who has looked a boreal forest lake in spring. Pollen, looking like bright yellow scum, coats the water surface. Often, it accumulates in stringers and is driven by wind and waves towards the lake margins. Sometimes the pollen scum is so prominent that people, especially those living near industrial plants, worry that it may be some kind of chemical contaminant, especially sulphur (see Beaudoin 2006).

Thoreau linked his observation of pollen on water with a similar statement from antiquity, although the source he cites is little known to most western readers today. Sacontala is a drama originally written in Sanskrit by an Indian poet named Calidas or Kalidasa. It is not known exactly when he lived, although it may have been around 400 AD (Franklin 2011:253). The play was translated into English by the orientalist William Jones and published in Calcutta in 1789. Soon thereafter, it was published in London and thereby became more widely available to the educated elite (Franklin 2011:252). Enthusiasm for all things oriental - literature, artworks, ceramics, and fabrics - swept western society in the late 18th and early 19th century and many scholars, Thoreau included, turned to works from the east for inspiration. Thoreau was apparently familiar with Sacontala and, after returning from his sojourn at Walden Pond, made notes on it to use in his essays (Richardson 1986:205, 267).

Thoreau’s observation of abundant pollen on the surface of Walden Pond suggests that the sediments might yield a good pollen record. This possibility must have occurred to Marjorie Winkler who in 1979 obtained a short core of sediment from the Pond and produced a pollen diagram documenting vegetation history spanning about the last 600 years (Winkler 1993). She noted a decline in pollen from trees and increase in pollen from herbs, including ragweed (Ambrosia), around 1635 AD, the time of European settlement in the Concord area. Pine pollen accounted for about 20% to 25% of the pollen assemblage in the upper part of the record (Winkler 1993: Figure 6b). Interesting, the record showed a switch between the predominance of Diploxylon pine (derived from pitch pine and red pine) pollen to Haploxylon pine (white pine) pollen shortly before Thoreau’s occupation at Walden. For the level dated about 1844 AD, the assemblage yielded about 13% Haploxylon and 4% Diploxylon pine pollen. Winkler (1993:207) concluded that white pine, oak and birch were the most abundant trees around Walden Pond at the time Thoreau lived there. This suggests that much of the pollen he saw floating on the water surface may actually have been from white pine (Pinus strobus), rather than pitch pine (Pinus rigida).

References

Beaudoin, A. B. 2006. Spring: The Season of Yellow Pond Scum. Mammoth Tracks Newsletter, Spring 2006, p. 8. Available at http://www.royalalbertamuseum.ca/vpub/tracks/tracks12.pdf

Franklin, M. J. 2011. Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794. Oxford University Press. 396 pages.

Maynard, W. B. 2004. Walden Pond: A History. Oxford University Press. x + 404 pages.

Richardson Jr, R.D. 1986. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. University of California Press. 464 pages.

Thoreau, H. D. 1986. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Penguin Classics edition. 431 pages.

Winkler, M. G. 1993. Changes at Walden Pond During the Last 600 Years: Microfossil Analyses of Walden Pond Sediments. In: Thoreau’s World and Ours: A Natural Legacy, edited by Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Barton, pp. 199-211. North American Press, Golden, Colorado, USA.

In CAP Newsletter (2011) 34(2):3-5.

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Ecclesiastical Beekeeping in Rural England

John Moore (1907-1967) was born in the small market town of Tewkesbury in the west of England; a town, incidentally, that was much in the news in 2007 when it was affected by severe flooding. Moore wrote many articles and books about rural life and the countryside. The best known of these are three books known collectively as the "Brensham Trilogy", which describe life in and around Tewkesbury (therein renamed "Elmbury") in years between the First and Second World Wars. In Brensham Village, using a blend of reminiscence and storytelling (a genre now sometimes called "docufiction"), Moore recounts his experiences growing up in the English countryside. Brensham is on the cusp of change, still predominantly preoccupied with rural and agricultural activities, but with ominous signs of transformation through a faceless Syndicate buying up decayed property for development. Nevertheless, Moore remembers his childhood as a time of sunshine, cricket, and colourful characters. In the following extract, Moore paints a word-portrait of Mr Mountjoy, a good-natured elderly clergyman, who is the lineal descendant of all those natural-history-studying vicars of Victorian fiction.

One of his hobbies was keeping bees. He had about fifty hives in his garden, and told us that their total population was nearly four million. "That’s as many bees as there are people in a great city. What a vast kingdom I rule!" On the first spring days he would stand contentedly for hours watching the workers sally forth and come back with the yellow crocus-pollen upon them; but at high summer he would often load some of the hives in the back of his small open car and go prospecting far afield for patches of beanflower or clover or sainfoin, and then beg the owner’s permission to leave a hive or two there so that his bees could gather the honey. It was a familiar sight to see the Rector driving down the lanes with half a dozen skeps occupying the back seat while a little swarm of his turbulent passengers rose from them like a thin smoke and swirled about his head.

From John Moore (1956) Brensham Village, Penguin Books, p. 44.
In CAP Newsletter (2010) 33(1):9.

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Charles Darwin and the Thrill of Discovery

Charles Darwin spent three years (1828-1831) as a student at Cambridge University, years that he later described as "the most joyful in my happy life". By his own account, however, he did not pay much attention to classes but spent much of his time in outdoor pursuits, especially shooting, hunting, riding, and collecting beetles. However, he was impressed with one of his professors, John Henslow, who taught botany. Henslow became a mentor to Darwin and an important influence in his scientific life for many years. Indeed, it was largely through Henslow’s influence that Darwin was offered the opportunity to join the Beagle voyage and it was to Henslow that he sent most of his specimens as he collected them throughout that journey. Darwin clearly regarded Henslow with great affection and describes him a good-natured man and a good teacher. In his Autobiography, Darwin gives an example of Henslow’s approach to teaching in the following account:

I cannot resist mentioning a trifling incident, which showed his kind consideration. Whilst examining some pollen-grains on a damp surface I saw the tubes exerted, and instantly rushed off to communicate my surprising discovery to him, Now I do not suppose any other Professor of Botany could help laughing at my coming in such a hurry to make such a communication. But he agreed how interesting the phenomenon was, and explained its meaning, but made me clearly understand how well it was known; so I left him not in the least mortified, but well pleased at having discovered for myself so remarkable a fact, but determined not to be in such a hurry again to communicate my discoveries.

One can speculate, of course, as to how far this early lesson of caution in communicating discovery may have influenced Darwin’s procrastination in publishing his ideas on the transmutation of species. It is well known that he spent many years in research and thought before finally being spurred to publication by the arrival of an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, which uncannily mirrored his ideas. This year, 2009, we celebrate both the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth (February 12 1809) and the 150th anniversary (November 24 1859) of the publication his book On the Origin of Species, by any standards one of the most influential science books ever written.

Quote from Barlow, Nora, editor (1969) The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, p. 66. W.W. Norton and Co., New York.
In CAP Newsletter (2009) 32(2):25.

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Dust storms demystified

Paul B. Sears (1891-1990) was a pioneering and influential ecologist and palaeoecologist. He was instrumental in incubating and encouraging the application of pollen analysis in North America, probably being best associated with the publication of the Pollen Analysis Circular. This informal bulletin, designed to encourage communication among practitioners of the nascent science, could be considered an ancestor of the CAP Newsletter! In one of the early issues, Sears included a suggestion by Hyde and Williams for using the word "palynology" to describe this new discipline, likely the first use of the term in North America. Sears was widely known and respected for his interdisciplinary approach to ecology and environmental studies. His concern for the environment and his desire to communicate that concern is evident throughout Deserts on the March. This book, written for a non-specialist audience, was designed to explain the ecological underpinnings of the Dust Bowl crisis. It calls for a new land ethic, a less destructive approach to land use. Today, we would probably brand this "sustainability". It remains an eminently readable book and much of what Sears says there is as applicable to the environmental situation today as it was when written more 70 years ago. Here he examines the complex composition of dust. Far from being the frightening symbol of disaster, the way it likely appeared to those people suffering through the fearsome dust storms of the 1930s, Sears contextualizes dust as part of the cycle of life.

Dust itself is nothing new. Like the circle, it is a symbol of eternal time. Long before the days of the microscope and the chemical balance, it was understood that dust is the beginning and the end of all things. Dust is always in the air we breathe, an invisible world of tiny, buoyant particles, infinitely rich in its variety, and with laws of its own. While most people think of it as being only minute bits of earth stirred up by strong air currents, it contains a host of living organisms, bacteria, molds, pollen, animals, as well as fragments of material from larger plants and animals. Except perhaps in air newly washed by rain, these particles float about perpetually sustained by gentle drifts in the atmosphere of which the human senses are scarcely aware. Even such a giant citizen of the world of dust as the plumed dandelion fruit can remain afloat indefinitely in a breeze of not more than three miles an hour. The microscopic grains of pollen and fungus spores, capable of ascent to the stratosphere, have their own curious globular symmetry, often richly marked, but with neither right nor left, top nor bottom, as fitted to the ocean of air as the fish, the fly, the elephant may be to the respective worlds in which they live. With the rising and falling of the currents, the particles of dust, living and dead, are perpetually settling out. The world of dust is never at rest...

From Paul B. Sears (1935) Deserts on the March, pp. 134-135. University of Oklahoma Press, Fourth Edition, 1980.
In CAP Newsletter (2009) 32(1):8.

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Arthur Philemon Coleman

Arthur Philemon Coleman (1852-1939) was a geologist and mountaineer, and spent much of his career as a professor of geology at the University of Toronto. Between 1884 and 1908, he made several trips to the Canadian Rockies, being particularly keen on making first ascents and exploring new ranges. In 1907, with two other men, he made the first attempt to climb Mount Robson, at almost 13,000 feet the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. They were defeated by the weather and the summit remained unattained until 1913. Coleman recounts many of his mountain adventures, especially his search for the legendary mounts Brown and Hooker, in The Canadian Rockies: New and Old Trails, a volume that has recently been reprinted. His narratives are enlivened by acute observation of the landscape through which he travelled and occasional self-deprecating humour. In the following passage, he describes a nunatak he explored in the Brazeau Icefield, now part of Banff National Park, on August 21, 1902.

The island of rock, or nunatak, was a crag a few acres in size a mile and a half from the edge of the icefield, and was probably not so very long ago buried under the glacier; but it now had its plants and animals, a little world enclosed in white. Beside the expected lichens and mosses were three flowering plants, pink campion, short-stemmed daisy-like blossoms and a low plant with a yellow, composite bloom. A few flies had escaped the dangers of the glacier and were on hand to do their duty to the flowers as carriers of pollen from plant to plant. In the sun toward the end of August things seemed cheerful enough, but more than three-quarters of the year must be winter.

From The Canadian Rockies: New and Old Trails, by A. P. Coleman, p. 125. Originally published 1911, reprint edition by Rocky Mountain Books, 2006.
In CAP Newsletter (2008) 31(2):19.

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Pollen as Metaphor

Nowadays, Sigrid Undset is not a well-known writer, even though she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. Her literary reputation was based largely on her magisterial three-volume historical novel, Kristin Lavransdattar, set in Norway in the 14th century. Her reputation was consolidated by another multivolume historical novel, The Master of Hestviken, also set in Norway, though somewhat earlier, in the late 13th and early 14th century. Each novel essentially concentrates on the life-story of one character, and provides an evocative and richly-detailed panorama of medieval life and society. In The Master of Hestviken, the central character is Olav Audunsson, a warrior and landowner. As a young man, Olav kills another man, Teit, who had seduced his fiancée, Ingunn. Although he was able to conceal the body and hide the murder, this act haunts Olav all his life, even though he knows that the law would say the killing was justified. In the following scene, during a trading voyage to London, he has a moment of revelation during a church service and makes up his mind to confess his sin and make himself right with the world. Here, pollen is used as a metaphor for the corrosive and constantly renewed effect of guilt.

He had pretended to be careless of the storm-but he had been so young; in secret he trembled with weariness. And he had not come through unsoiled: his heart was surely as turbid as the tarn north in the woods, when on the melting of the snows all the grey and rapid streams had emptied themselves into it. And no sooner had it cleared a little after the flood than the spruce forest round its banks came out and powdered the brown bog-water with yellow. But here at the foot of the altar he felt the Spirit of God as a cleansing wind-the mawkish pollen blown away: once more his life would be bright and open as the tarn, reflecting the sheer blue and the sun and the clouds on their passage across the sky.

From The Master of Hestviken by Sigrid Undset, New American Library Edition, 1978, p. 550.
In CAP Newsletter (2008) 31(1):7.

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A Sudden Summer Storm

Patrick Leigh Fermor is one of the great travel writers of the last century. In the early 1930s, at the age of 18, he set off to walk from the Netherlands to Constantinople, a journey that took him almost two years to accomplish. Many years later, he described his wanderings through middle Europe in two wonderful books, A Time of Gifts (1978) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). Apart from the marvellous writing, the appeal of these books lies in the fact that they are describing a lost world. The landscapes and people he describes were soon to be changed for ever by the Second World War.

He encountered diverse communities and vibrant cultural groups before they suffered postwar homogenisation. His books are filled with descriptions of different regional clothing styles, vernacular and formal architecture, speech and dialects, foods and drinks, and social customs. All the places he visits are set firmly into their historical context, when the bend of a river can recall a medieval battle, the name of a local family is linked to the Crusades, and the looming mass of a castle is a response to long-ago political struggles. Even small events are described with lyricism and nostalgia. Here is just one example. With some friends, he visited a church near a small town in Transylvania. While talking to the church organist, they were caught in a sudden storm, which he describes as follows:

There had been a warning rush and a flutter. Then all at once the branches were banging about, hitting each other like boxers, and dust and pollen flew from the boughs in a twisting yellow cloud. Grass flattened twirling and forking into channels, every poplar in the valley shuddered from root to tip like a Malay kris and the loosened hay-ricks moulted in spirals. Husks, chaff, straw, petals, young twigs, last year’s leaves and nosegays scattered out of the jam-jars on the graves were rushing up the slope in a gale which tossed the dishevelled birds about the air. The clouds had darkened, a volley of drops fell and we and the organist sheltered from the downpour under a clump of chestnuts. It stopped just as abruptly and we found ourselves, as a rainbow formed and dissolved again in a momentary foxes’ wedding, looking down, as though through a magnifying glass, at a world of hills and meadows and the flash of a river and an upheaval of distant ranges. Outraged cawing and twittering filled the branches and the air was adrift with the scent of pollen, roses, hay and wet earth.

From Patrick Leigh Fermor (1986) Between the Woods and the Water. Penguin Books. page 158.
In CAP Newsletter (2005) 28(2):4-5

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Tolstoy on Pollination

Towards the end of War and Peace, Tolstoy meditates on the interpretation of history. He considers that historical events are the sum of a myriad of individual decisions, and that ascribing purpose or direction to events is only possible with the benefit of hindsight. Any event or individual action can be viewed from many perspectives, and the interpretation or, to use his word, purpose depends on the viewer’s perspective. In support of this argument, he offers the following analogy drawn from natural history:

A bee poised on a flower has stung a child. And so the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees are there to sting people. A poet delights in the bee sipping honey from the calyx of a flower and says the bees exists to suck the nectar of flowers. A bee-keeper, seeing the bee collect pollen and carry it to the hive, says that the object of bees is to gather honey. Another bee-keeper, who has studied the life of the swarm more closely, declares that the bee gathers pollen-dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists of the propagation of its species. The botanist, observing that a bee flying with pollen from one dioecious plant to the pistil of another fertilizes the latter, sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, remarking the hybridization of plants and seeing that the bee assists in this work, may say that herein lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first or the second or the third of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect soars in the discovery of possible purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.

From War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1869. From Volume 2, Penguin Classics edition, 1957, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, pp. 1349-1350
In CAP Newsletter (2005) 28(1):4

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The Symmetry of Pollen

... The triangles, ovals, trefoils and eared circles of pollen are minutely perfect. The pollen grain of chicory - an outer and inner hexagon united by rays - is a rose-window in a shrine of lapis-lazuli. It needs no light behind it, for it illumines itself. Within is no mere painting, but a powerful principle, an active creature, the architect of next year's sky-blue temple. There is a striking unity in some flowers between the shape of the pollen grain and that of the calix and corolla. The open chicory flower and the pollen grain are both polygonal and rayed from the centre. The pollen grain of the passion flower - like a round filigree box with a lid - is almost exactly the same in construction as the centre of the flower with its enamelled cut-work of stamen, stigma and filament.

From The Spring of Joy by Mary Webb, originally published by J. M. Dent and Sons, 1917, reprinted by Wildwood House, London, 1982, pp. 94-95.
In CAP Newsletter (1995) 18(3):17

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At Sea

In the sea there are mysterious comings and goings, both in space and time: the movements of migratory species, the strange phenomenon of succession by which, in one and the same area, one species appears in profusion, flourishes for a time, and then dies out, only to have its place taken by another and then another, like actors in a pageant passing before our eyes. And there are other mysteries. The phenomenon of "red tides" has been known from early days, recurring again and again down to the present time - a phenomenon in which the sea becomes discoloured because of the extraordinary multiplication of some minute form, often a dinoflagellate, and in which there are disastrous side effects in the shape of mass mortalities among fish and some of the invertebrates. Then there is the problem of curious and seemingly erratic movements of fish, into or away from certain areas, often with sharp economic consequences. ...

In the discovery of the biological role played by the sea water and all it contains, we may be about to reach an understanding of these old mysteries. For now it is clear that in the sea nothing lives to itself. The very water is altered, in its chemical nature and in its capacity for influencing life processes, by the fact that certain forms have lived within it and have passed on to it new substances capable of inducing far-reaching effects. So the present is linked with the past and future, and each living thing with all that surrounds it.

From The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1952).
In CAP Newsletter (1998) 21(2):29

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Pollen in the South Shetland Islands

David Campbell is a biologist who spent three field seasons, the austral summers, in the South Shetland Islands. This remote archipelago lies north of the Antarctic peninsula and south of Tierra del Fuego. In the passage below, Campbell has found a piece of petrified wood as he climbs down Flagstaff Mountain on King George Island. He reflects on what this tells us about environmental changes in this region:

On the eastern shore of Admiralty Bay, at Cape Hennequin, there is a fossil forest: 16-million-year-old fossil impressions of plants embedded in ripple-marked and aqueous tuffs. These include leaves of several species of Nothofagus (tinged brownish as if they had just fallen in the autumn wind), of the gymnosperm genus Araucaria, of ferns, and of several unnamed flowering trees that drifted into a fast-flowing stream and were rapidly smothered by sediments. My fossil, which so eloquently depicts seasonality in its stone rings, is from this epoch, when Admiralty Bay had a climate and flora nearly identical to those of Patagonia today. Imagine: flowing rivers and warm, halcyon summers. Did the leaves of this tree flutter in a wind that blew off a temperate sea? Did birds forage in its boughs by day; did marsupials snuffle in its leaf litter by night? Was its pollen dispersed by wind, or was it pollinated by long-vanished insects?

From The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica, by David G. Campbell, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993, p. 51.
In CAP Newsletter (2002) 25(2):26