She preserves his precious library—Aldo Leopold, John Muir, his botany texts, the Ag Extension pamphlets he helped to write. She finds his copy of adult Ovid, marked all over, as people mark beeches. The underscores start, triple, on the very first line: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
HIGH SCHOOL tries to kill her. Viola in the orchestra, the maple howling with old hillside memories, under her chin. Photography and volleyball. She has two almost-friends who understand the reality of animals, at least, if not quite plants. She shuns all jewelry, dresses in flannel and denim, carries a Swiss Army knife, and wears her long hair wrapped around her skull in braids.
A stepfather arrives, one who’s smart enough not to try to reform her. There’s a trauma involving a quiet boy who dreams for two years of taking her to the senior prom, a boy whose dream must die from a white-oak stake through the heart.
In the summer of her eighteenth year, preparing to head to Eastern Kentucky to study botany, she remembers the beech growing in its tub of soil, out by the barn. Shame rushes through her: How could she have forgotten the experiment? She has missed her promise to her father by two years. Skipped sweet sixteen altogether.
She spends an entire July afternoon freeing the tree from the soil and crumbling every thimble of dirt from its roots. Then she weighs both the plant and the earth it fed on. The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There’s no other explanation: almost all the tree’s mass has come from the very air. Her father knew this. Now she does, too.
She replants their experiment in a spot behind the house where she and her father liked to sit on summer nights and listen to what other people called silence. She remembers what he told her about the species. People, God love ’em, must write all over beeches. But some people—some fathers—are written all over by trees.
Before she goes away to school, she puts the tiniest notch in the smooth gray booklike bark of the trunk with her army knife, four feet above the ground.
EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY turns her into someone else. Patricia blooms like something southern-facing. The air of the sixties crackles as she crosses campus, a change in the weather, the smell of days lengthening, the scent of possibility breaking the cast of outdated thought, a clear wind rolling down from the hills.
Her dorm room overflows with potted plants. She’s not the only one on her floor to fit a botanical garden between the student desk and bunk bed. But her plants are the only ones with strips of data taped to their terra-cotta pots. Where her friends grow baby’s breath and blue-eyed violets, she grows tickseed and partridge pea and other experiments. And yet, she also cares for a bonsai juniper that looks to be a thousand years old, a spiky haiku of a creature with no scientific purpose whatsoever.
The girls from upstairs come down some nights to check on her. They’ve made her into a pet project. Let’s get Plant-Patty drunk. Let’s fix Plant-Patty up with that beatnik econ guy. They mock her studiousness and laugh at her calling. They force her to listen to Elvis. They slip her into sleeveless sheaths and pile up her hair in a bouffant. They call her the Queen of Chlorophyll. She’s not of the herd. She doesn’t always hear them well, and when she does, their words don’t always make sense. And yet her frantic fellow mammals do make her smile: miracles on all sides, and still they need compliments to keep them happy.
Sophomore year, Patty gets a job in the campus greenhouses—two hours stolen every morning before classes. Genetics, plant physiology, and organic chemistry take her through evening. She studies every night at her carrel until the library closes. Then she reads for pleasure until she falls asleep. She does try the books her friends are reading: Siddhartha, Naked Lunch, On the Road. But nothing else moves her more than Peattie’s Natural Histories, books from her father’s shelves. Now they’re her endless refreshment. Their phrases branch and turn to catch the sun:
Thrones have crumbled and new empires arisen; great ideas have been born and great pictures painted, and the world revolutionized by science and invention; and still no man can say how