THE SACRED LOTUS, with its bounteous white flowers and pristine leaves levitating above even polluted Asiatic rivers, is one of the most beautiful and revered plants on earth. Across 2,000 years and a swathe of cultures, it has been a symbol of purity rising out of corruption. Right up until the Maoist Revolution Chinese children were expected to memorise a lotus homily written by the eleventh-century philosopher Zhou Dunyi:
[The lotus] emerges from muddy water but is not contaminated; it reposes modestly above the clear water; hollow inside and straight outside, its stems do not struggle or branch … Resting there with its radiant purity, the lotus is something to be appreciated from a distance, not profaned by intimate approach.
Vegetal hygiene becomes visual beauty becomes a respectful ethical principle. Did early Chinese scientists understand how lotus leaves were able to throw off the mud they grew through, and be seen, emblematically, as a kind of moral Teflon? It’s now known that the peculiar surface characteristics of the leaves make it impossible for fluids, however viscous and contaminated, to get a grip, and they simply flow away. The leaves self-clean. Today, while garlands of the starry flowers continue to be worn as Buddhist religious symbols, the engineering of the leaves has been appropriated by secular technology to manufacture a range of products patented under the trademark ‘Lotus-Effect’. They include a house paint that is claimed never to need washing, except by rain, and non-stick spoons for honey. When we look at a sacred lotus, do we intuit this fundamental part of its identity, the root source of its symbolic power as well as its survival as a plant? Or just see the gentle welcome in the gorgeous petals?
While writing this chapter I persuaded the curator at Kew Gardens to let me take some lotus leaves home. They made a rather nondescript bundle, like a sheaf of rhubarb. But I had a plan for them. My partner Polly’s grandkids – aged nine, seven and four – were staying for the weekend, and I wanted to know how they ‘saw’ the lotus, and what they made of its remarkable behaviour in contact with fluids, especially gooey ones. They enjoyed the strange velvet feel of the leaves, at least to start with. But children aren’t aesthetes in that sense. They wanted action. I tried plain water first, holding a leaf horizontally so that it formed a shallow bowl, pouring in a cup of water, then gently tilting it back and forth. Globules of silver water whizzed about the leaf, occasionally coalescing, then being broken up into grapeshot by the ribs. The children burst into hysterical giggles, a sure sign of amazement. I can’t believe the youngest had ever seen mercury, but he remarked, with precocious poetry, that the water roller-balls were like ‘liquid metal’. Dirty water was next, and produced the same results, but nothing compared to the theatrical effect of tomato ketchup, which wriggled about the leaf like a company of disorderly scarlet slugs. Then I just tipped the whole lot off and flourished a completely unstained leaf.
Later I showed them an electron micrograph of the leaf’s surface, and the rows of close-stacked, smoothly rounded pimples which are the reason even the stickiest fluids can’t get a grip. But they were only marginally interested. This was not what they had seen, had experienced. I left them with the remaining leaves and their yelps at the behaviour of egg and golden syrup, until stimulation fatigue set in and the leaves became more interesting as sun shades and face slappers.
Seeing a plant is a matter of scale and relevance. We notice aspects which accord with our own frameworks of time and proportion, and which speak to our needs, whether aesthetic or economic. Only rarely – when we’re children, for example, untroubled by such refined and narrow neediness – do we sometimes glimpse what is important for the plant itself. In this section I have looked at how the first modern humans, the Palaeolithics, saw plants; and how, working with an insightful photographer, I began myself to learn how the superficial appearance of a plant – our framed image of it – relates to its own life and goals.