Rhizome Too

At the end of summer a friend and I were walking on a trail where the plants seemed to be winding down as the days had become cooler and shorter. Everything in the woods was in shades of brown and grayish tan. Suddenly my friend spotted something bright red, and seemingly out of place, on a rotting log. We bent over this something, trying to figure out what it could possibly be. Up close we could see that the surface of this blob was curiously bubbly, or maybe a better word would be ’bumpy’ -- something like grits or coarse cornmeal, only shiny, as though it might be damp to the touch. We placed a few sticks near the rotting log as markers so that we could find it again the next day after we had done a little research.The next afternoon the mysterious red blob was still on the log, still a bit shiny and lumpy. Some research had told us that this might be what scientists have named a Tuberose ferruginosa, commonly called a red raspberry slime mold. We returned to the log a few days later and found that the red raspberry slime mold had morphed into a patch of dry brown unshiny stuff. Research had told us that this was the spore-producing stage of what had been an immature bright red sporangium or fruiting body of a slime mold. The dry brown spores were now being dispersed by the wind. Like all slime molds, the new ones would soon begin engulfing and digesting bacteria, protozoa, and non-living organic matter and releasing them back into the soil.Suddenly I began finding slime molds everywhere, in plain view as well as in places I had never bothered to look before. I had been launched into a new direction: drawing and learning about the unseen or hard-to-see members of the rhizomic forest ecosystem -- the slime molds, the lichens, the tiny mosses and liverworts, the exquisite fruiting bodies of fungi, the exotic polypores. In Rhizome Too these members take center stage alongside the insects, plants, mammals and other creatures that rely on them for life.This book begins in a middle and meanders through other middles. It ends with a few pages for you to note your own observations, questions, sketches, and responses. As such, this book about rhizomes, both botanical and philosophical, is itself a rhizome more than a hierarchically organized structure. You can open at random and wander through in any order that pleases you. As with any rhizome, there are places from which new paths, shoots, and roots can grow; you will also find links to more information in some of the entries. May this little book serve as an eye-opener and launch-pad for your own explorations.