When AnOther asked up-and-coming novelist Ceridwen Dovey to write us a short story inspired by the word 'maverick', she penned us Biological Wildfire.
When AnOther asked up-and-coming novelist Ceridwen Dovey to write us a short story inspired by the word 'maverick', she penned us Biological Wildfire, an offbeat, imaginary letter from one plant collector to another, delving into scientific discoveries, in-jokes, and behind the scenes politics after a single tragic event.
It’s the way you died that keeps me awake at night. During the day at the Bureau, my regrets are ordered as neatly as the cotton packages piled in the warehouse awaiting processing: why had I not tried harder to convince you this time not to return to China, explained that the entomologists were turning popular opinion against us, that they had started to accuse our immigrants of being pest smugglers, foreign marauders, exotic plunderers here to rob the natives of their birthright-given rays of American sun and a piece of land in which to put down roots? But at night, with my knees tucked against my chest to ease the pain in my lower back from stooping in the experimental gardens, there is nothing I can do to domesticate my despair when I think of you drowning in the Yangtze as if you were an amateur, as green as the plants you’d been sent to hunt, falling overboard and not knowing how to swim. My mind will not process this fact of your absurd death. It does not help that your letters still arrive, months after you sent them, tucked into the sphagnum moss around a seedling that you knew only I would have the authority to inspect. Another arrived this morning, between the layers of waxed paper you had wound around a Chinese soybean plant. That sour widow Patterson saw me tuck it against my heart beneath my waistcoat.
She is still gloating over her victory with the Japanese flowering cherry trees – do you remember? I never knew which of my letters you received and which never made it and when you were back on those brief sweet physical visits neither of us wanted anything to do with words. The Mayor of Tokyo gave two thousand of the trees to the United States a few years ago, and Patterson found crown gall and an unidentified Pestalotia species on them and persuaded our government to burn every single one of the trees in a bonfire on the Mall. Imagine the loss of face for the Japanese! They had to ship a second set of fumigated trees to be planted in the Tidal Basin and only then did Patterson with her precious National Fungus Collection grudgingly grant them entry.
I went to see your little Frank Jr. on my way home, intending to read him parts of your letter. Abby was there, of course, and in her grief she has lost the decorum which kept her unfailingly polite to me in the past. Today her suspicions made her mouth ugly and it was too risky to read to Frankie from the letter in case she ripped it from my hands and saw clear-eyed every sentence you had seen fit to address to me. Instead, I read to him from that old rollicking British schoolboy novel that you sent me as a joke while I was in Brazil bringing back navel orange trees, the one that starts with the imaginary exchange between the author and his young readers:
A plant hunter! What is that?
We have heard of fox hunters, of deer hunters, of bear and buffalo hunters, of lion hunters, but of a plant hunter, never.
Stay! Truffles are plants. Dogs are used in finding them; and the collectors of these is termed a truffle hunter. Perhaps this is what the Captain means?
No, my boy reader. Something very different from that. My plant hunter is no fungus digger. His occupation is that of a nobler kind than contributing merely to the capricious palate of the gourmand. To his labors the whole civilized world is indebted – yourself among the rest.
All this to work up to the retort that I have prepared for the next time Patterson besmirches your legacy, claiming she has discovered yet another rampantly invasive insect or fungus on one of the precious green immigrants you bequeathed to me and to our great country. “My plant hunter is no fungus digger,” I will say to her quietly, as I unwrap the dry land pistachio seeds you last ran through your heroic fingers and order them to be sown on probation until their worth cannot be denied.
You wrote the letter in Jingmen, in the province of Hubei. I wanted Frankie to hear about the miracle of the soybean varieties you discovered. I wanted him to hear that the floral resemblance between China and the American South is so close that somebody suddenly transported from either region to the other would not always exactly realize where he was. You would not like this, but I am teaching him to memorize every plant, fruit and bean we have you to thank for. So far, he can recite, “alfalfa, Amur cherry, barley, bean sprout, Bradford pear, celery-cabbage, chestnut, chaulmoogra oil tree, dwarf lilac, gingko, Meyer lemon, Siberian elm, zoysia grass.” He knows you like the wild, fast-growing tropical legumes the best while I favor less spectacular plants that initially struggle to make their way in their new world, that have to slowly and unobtrusively woo the public. As if they deserve to be wooed! Their collective memory is so limited they claim apples are American. They sit over their piles of steaming non-native potatoes smothered in butter and parsley; they slice alien tomatoes wantonly for their lunchboxes, and now, spurred on by the newly xenophobic entomologists, they dare to accuse us of letting outsiders invade their homeland. Don’t they see that your soybean might one day be as important as the telephone and the typesetting machine?
That kudzu vine you found in Japan has become my main passion. I think it will build up humus and control erosion far better than the Mimosa invisa we brought back together from Java (how we teased each other about its common name: giant sensitive plant!). Patterson has herself in a little frenzy about the kudzu, which she claims creeps so quickly it will smother everything in its path. I found her lurking beside its restricted plot on Chapman Field last week with a tin of gasoline, claiming she had the authority to douse and torch it. We both know women mistake their intuition for solid judgment and I tried to distract her by telling her about my own special feeling of pride in our American willingness to try something new, whether it be a new forage crop, a new food, or any one of a thousand new, machine-made gadgets. “Florida would be nothing but pine and palmetto if not for that willingness,” I said to her. “There would be no shade, no beauty, no fruitfulness.” She reluctantly left the kudzu intact, but I fear not for long, and to be safe I have secretly planted some of its seeds on my property on the southeast coast, where you and I were to have spent the summer together.
From the sublime…
The American Forestry Association has asked me to write a “My Favorite Tree” guest column for their journal. It is exactly the kind of puerile idea you disdained about conservation in this country, but I have been pressured by the powers that be at the Bureau to respond, and to respond – patriotically, as they put it. What I wouldn’t give to see you read it with a slow ironic grin, lying beside me under a mosquito net as an afternoon thunderstorm builds around us.
I saw my first grove of California coastal redwoods fairly late in life, at a time when I was still besotted with exotic Asiatic promise. A feeling of utter paralysis overtook me and the passion for transplanting my puny little foreign trees became immediately distasteful to me. The redwood, though it is found only in California and one tiny patch of southwest Oregon, is truly more American than any other tree in the United States. It has no relatives, near or distant, in any other country.
Ceridwen Dovey published her debut novel Blood Kin aged 26. A haunting fable circling around three characters caught up in a violent military coup, it focused on ideas of complicity, guilt and power, and was partly inspired by her own experiences being born and raised in South Africa. The 29 year old recently completed an Anthropology degree at NYU, a documentary on wine empowerment projects in South Africa, and has just moved to Australia to work on her anticipated follow up novel.
Mark Maggiori is a photographer, painter, writer, and film-maker based in Paris.
