Where Lycos spread his canopy of spores
And arborescent club-trees ruled the swamp,
Where ancient fog rolled in from distant shores
And coal-swamp vapors made the forest damp,
A different kind of tree had learned to stand
Against the dry-spell and the season's change:
Great Gymnos, son of Phyllon, found his hand
Could hold what spores could not across the range
Of drier hillsides where the swamp's wet edge
Gave way to ridge and upland far from water—
He built a seed, a sealed and private pledge
Of life delivered to the following quarter
Of next year's rain through all the drought between:
The naked seed set free upon the wind
Without a flower's case to wrap it clean—
Just seed and scale and hope, nothing pinned
To being near a pond or river's strand
Where spore-borne plants required water's kiss
To carry gametes—Gymnos touched dry land
And never more would need a pond for this.
"I am the master of the hilltop bare,"
Said Gymnos as he claimed the ridge above,
"Where Lycos cannot grow, I find my care
And plant my children with the wind's own love.
No water need I find to carry sperm—
I place my pollen on the wind to blow
Across the valley to the waiting term
Of ovule where my children start to grow."
Four children bore great Gymnos in his days
To carry on the naked-seeded line:
First Cordaios, lord of coal-swamp ways,
Then Cycados, then Conifera fine,
And last of all came Ginkga ancient-old
Who'd outlast every other of the four
To stand alone like living stories told
From when the dinosaurs would walk no more.
Great Cordaios was the first to tower
Above the Carboniferous forest floor:
A tree of forty meters, hour by hour
He'd grown to match the Lepidos before.
His long and strap-like leaves were something new—
No frond, no scale, no spore-cone here below,
But blade-like foliage catching every view
Of sunlight filtering through the forest's glow.
His seeds hung naked on the outer scales
Of female cones that opened to the air—
No shelter but the wind that never fails
To carry tiny seeds to somewhere fair.
And Cordaios grew beside the swamp
In vast and shadowy groves of coal-to-be
That would in ages hence give flame its stomp
On industry—his body, crushed, set free
As energy for those who mine the seams
Of mountain ranges in the modern years:
The carbon that he built from ancient dreams
Now rises with the smoke that engineering bears.
But Cycados had chosen something strange:
He grew more slowly, kept his fronds like palms,
And learned to live across the widest range
Of seasons, drought, and heat without the qualms
Of quick growth—patience was his strategy,
A trunk as round as barrel, soft inside,
With fronds that crowned him in a symmetry
Of ancient beauty and unchanging pride.
His partnership with root-dwellers that
Fixed nitrogen below the ground
Was chemistry more subtle than combat—
The gift of partnership that always found
Enriched soil around him, so the world
Where cycads spread their fronds and grew their cones
Was richer than the bare land left unfurled
By those who worked in solitude alone.
Great Conifera chose to grow in cold
And dry and rocky places shunned by all—
On mountainsides and ridges bare and bold
Where other trees would freeze or fail to call
The growing season long enough to fill
A full canopy of leafy green—
So Conifera built a needle still
And small that slows the water-leaving scene.
The needle: leaf reduced to spike so fine
That winter winds cannot desiccate
Or dry it out—the resin and the pine
Of waxy coating let him operate
Through all the seasons, even when the cold
Has stripped the broad-leafed trees of every blade—
He stands through winter green and proud and bold
And never needs to hide in autumn's shade.
His cones were sealed against the winter's blow:
A woody armor over every seed
Until the warmth returns to let them go
And scatter where new forests are to seed.
Then there is Ginkga, most ancient of all—
A fan-shaped leaf like none that came before,
Who'd watch the dinosaurs both rise and fall
And still be standing after all their roar
Had faded into stone—the ginkgo tree
That Buddhist monks would tend in temple courts,
Who'd stand through every age with dignity
And make of permanence the highest sort
Of evolutionary wisdom: being old
Is being tested and being found to last,
And Ginkga's children tell the world they hold
A place no force has managed to erase past.
The naked seed teaches us that sometimes
The unenclosed and open carries more:
No flower's bright advertising—only rhymes
Of wind and chance to find the waiting shore
Of fertile soil where the naked seed
Can root and grow without a mother's care—
Self-sufficient, sealed against all need
For anything but earth and light and air.
Honor great Gymnos and his naked-seeded line:
The cycad's patience, conifer's cold might,
The cordaitalean grove beside the brine,
The ginkgo standing through all change in sight.
From Gymnos' hillside where the wind blows free
To forests that shall outlast all we know,
The gymnosperms remind us to be
The ones who plant where others dare not go.