Life on the Edge

What is the natural order of things? Who or what follows whom? Is there a correct sequence to events in the world? Do things move along a prescribed path?

Take, for instance, fruit on a tree. The botany class I had as a youngster taught me that trees flower in spring, get pollinated by bees and other insects, bear fruit as a result of that pollination, and hidden within the fruit is one or more seeds to move the generations along.

Curious this.

Today I stood in front of the cheesewood tree (pittosporum bicolor) and something wasn’t quite jellying with my boyhood lessons because the tree’s fruit was behaving more like a flower.

Let’s go back a few months. In early spring the cheesewood brings forth an abundance of small, yellow, bell shaped flowers. Once pollinated, the mysterious workings of the world set about to transform this sexual encounter into bearing fruit. So far, so good. The laws of nature seem to be on track.

Today, hanging like luscious apricots (but much smaller), one might think that this particular cycle of the story is almost completed with some animal or bird soon to eat the fruit. Later, defecating out the fruit’s seed elsewhere, the seeds will germinate, thus, starting the process all over again.

But something magical happens with the cheesewood. The fruit, it seems, likes remembering when it was a flower and, therefore, splits itself open and turns itself into two flower petals.  Presented on two plates of yellow is a sticky red secondary fruit with seeds within it. Why the extra step? Why the throwback into being a flower? Who knows?

When one begins to look closer into the workings of nature, things just get curiouser and curiouser