When Plants Battle: Both Armies Wear Green

There's something about us human beings that makes us feel that if we really want adventures, if we want to experience life, we have to go somewhere else. From Homer's Odyssey to Cervantes's Don Quixote, from Melville's Moby-Dick to far-flung reality television programs, people have left home to find excitement, adventure, and conflict.

If we know what we are looking at, rather than what we are looking for, we can find epic struggles going on all the time, right in our own back yards. I'm always humbled to think that the great French entomologist Henri Fabre (more) based his life's work on observations he made in an area not significantly larger than my back yard.

As long as plants and animals have been alive, things have never stood still. Today, in a quiet patch of green, we can see the kind of struggle that may have been a factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The lizard-tail (pictures and more), named for the shape of its flowers, is a modest little plant native to the southeastern United States. You can find it in moist, shady areas blooming in the spring.

The air yam (pictures and more) is a relative of the yams that are almost as important as turkey for Thanksgiving dinner-and also a relative to the plant that provides the active ingredient in birth control pills. An invasive vine, it can grow very rapidly, because, like all vines, it does not have to devote nourishment to building a sturdy upright stem.

When the two plants are growing in the same area, it is likely that the lizard-tail will be crowded out by the air yam, and so, a few square feet in the back yard or along the side of the road can be a battlefield (as you can see in my photo). Ecology is not just about how we human beings get along with our environment; it is about how all living things interact.

When I used to teach children about dinosaurs, I often talked about carnivorous and herbivorous animals. The young paleontologists often asked if a particular animal was "good" or "bad," that is, if it ate plants (good) or meat (bad). Of course, animals are pretty much beyond good and bad. A meat-eater does what a meat-eater gotta do, while from the point of view of a blade of grass, a cow is a mass-murderer. (If you are interested in dinosaurs, you can find more about them here.)

Although it is tempting to cheer on the home team, the gentle little lizard-tails trying to hold onto their homeland, the truth is, the air yam is not trying to do the natives in. It is simply doing what it does best: grow.

We don't have to take a NASA flight or head out to wherever the latest reality television stars are surviving. If we keep our eyes open to see what we are looking at, we can find Heaven in a grain of sand, and a mighty epic in what many would dismiss as a patch of weeds.