Jonathan Billinger, Willowherb seed heads
CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Going to Seed, Whorling Into Time
She looks marvelously weathered, old beyond her years. She has gone
to seed. Soon she’ll start to scare people. Well, she has always scared people. (1)
Years ago I had a dream that was at once nightmarish and virtually fantastical. In this dream, I woke to find a strange plant sprouting from the back of my left lower leg. It was, to the best of my visual recall, part fungus, part woody shrub, and part vine, in various shades of green. Its base, that is, the area surrounding a cleft in my calf muscle, was soft and spongy, like moss or lichen. A number of large, lush, mandorla-shaped leaves emerged from ropey tendrils that made their way upwards, around my thigh and beyond. Several of these vines were topped with bright light-yellow flowers with spiky seed pods.
Obviously, I was quite relieved upon my actual waking to see that nothing of the sort had occurred during the night. But I was also immensely curious as to what this far-fetched and somewhat frightening vision might mean. Was there some physical or mental infirmity within my body or mind that triggered this midnight imagining? Or perhaps it told of an unacknowledged gift, as yet to be conferred upon my being?
… I was weeding the back garden and thinking about the way plants seed themselves, …
They have no ability at all to travel great distances under their own power, and yet, they do travel. …
There are islands thousands of miles from anywhere… where plants seeded themselves and grew… (2)
When we say that a plant is going to seed, we mean that it has completed its cycle of flowering and fruit bearing. Presumably, the saying came into use through the development of agriculture, as vigilant farmers noted and poeticized this phase of their crops’ life cycle. (3) At this stage, plants produce seeds that will eventually be dispersed by wind, insects, animals, or human intervention. Technically, an individual seed is the fertilized egg of the flowering plant. The embryo is held within the seed’s attenuated yet resilient shell, along with stored sustenance for its nascent growth. (4) In favorable coinciding conditions of climate and soil, the seed will develop into a wholly new vegetal entity. Through this process, then, most woody plants may send their progeny forth even as they begin to perish. (5)
For a plant, this phase of life is, in fact, life-sustaining. Yet, the colloquialism going to seed, often implies that which has been neglected: a deteriorated or uncared-for person or property, for example. Consequently, in reference to this common if disparaging phrase, I began to wonder if my body’s curious oneiric sprouting in the midst of my sixth decade might signal its final flourish. Might I actually already be going to seed! And yet, returning to the expression’s inherent contradiction, whether botanical, agricultural, or metaphorical, in relation to a seed’s potentiality, it suggests something far more spacious than mere maturation or demise.
Now, a decade and more since that illuminative dream, the process of aging seems so far, quite long, as life itself may also be. And aside from any personal bid to remain nimble and perhaps, relevant, I am experiencing this passage in time as more nexus than line. Now, even as I approach the limits of my being, and even in the midst of heartrending loss, the assumed fixedness of life’s finality appears, like so many other human-designated borders, all the more permeable and tenuous.
Ximonic (Simo Räsänen), Decaying mossy wood by the
Vanha Rekolanoja river in Rekolanojanpuisto, Rekola, Vantaa, Finland, 2021
CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
She has never inhaled such fecund putrefaction. The sheer mass of ever-dying life packed into
each single cubic foot … Looking at all this glorious decay, a person might be forgiven for thinking that old meant decadent,
that such thick mats of decomposition were cellulose cemeteries in need of the rejuvenating ax. (6)
Presumed sequences of life and death become fluid as we observe flourishing ecosystems in the presence of dead and dying matter. (7) Tangles of decaying tree roots, trunks, and limbs called snags provide habitat for wild flora and fauna, including many red-listed species. Ecologist George Wuerthner notes that snags cycle nutrients, aid plant regeneration, decrease erosion and aid soil moisture and carbon storage. (8) Forest ecologist and conservationist David Lindenmayer elucidates: as trees decompose, carbon and nitrogen stores are slowly reabsorbed into the soil, a critical step in nutrient recycling, both for saplings and for the larger ecosystem. (9)
Aurélien Adoue, Mycélium au devant de la scène
CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons
Ongoing studies by ecologists and interdisciplinary forest researchers reinforce our expanding awareness of life on earth—its myriad forms, capacities, cycles, and its interconnectivity. Through her analysis of tree root DNA, author and forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, (the inspiration for The Overstory’s Patricia Westerford and the subject of two of this essay’s quotations) identified the pivotal role of fungal filaments called mycorrhizae. These fibrils form underground networks that transfer carbon, water, and other life-sustaining nutrients between trees of the same and different species and other flora and life forms. (10) Research by Simard and others also suggests the transmission of responsive communication between trees and others, through mycorrhizal circuitry. Recently, this perspective has come under scrutiny, especially when verging on the personification of plant life. (11) Still, apart from this, perhaps, ideological variance, old-growth forests of fertile and decaying ecosystems decidedly impart vital elements and beneficial microorganisms to burgeoning seedlings. Here, then, the reciprocity between old, new, past, present, and future, is maintained.
As in the earth’s soils, waters and atmospheres, within each multicellular form of life, interspecies communities of microflora and fauna thrive. Microbes move freely within their own species, and they also migrate between unrelated organisms across different realms of life through a process called horizontal gene transfer. This microbial merging drives rapid adaptation, contributing to the evolution of diverse traits and functions and a more interconnected web of life. (12) Each of us hosts a multi-dimensional latticework consisting of the smallest, simplest, and earliest forms of telluric life. That we are all essentially comparable versions of such comprehensive macrocosms, explicitly obfuscates the margins of time, space, self, and other.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not
anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower
they themselves never hoped to see. (13)
As seeds are sown and nurtured by soil, water, and light, they grow up into future time. Concurrently below ground, they develop roots and genetically composed fungal filaments, with which they stitch themselves into the subterranean landscape and the evolutionary microbiome.
Going to seed is another frequency along the spectrum of life in material form. In this context we are all going to seed, in that seeding is the thing that we do. We lay groundwork, formulate ideas, make objects, and express our reflections audibly and in writing. We sow seeds of proliferation, and sew threads of connection, intent on progress and subject to change.
Beyond those purposeful aspects of a life lived, our evanescent forms continually slough off substances and emit energies. Might those shedding cells and droplets of savory fluids, and even our resonant thoughts and dreams, be absorbed into and metabolized by individual others, or perhaps too, the universal aggregate?
Let our flowers bloom and wither, let our fruits ripen and fall as the fragments of our substantive selves merge with the dust of earth and stars. Let us know unambiguously, particularly in the face of any messaging to the contrary, that we are all of the same matter(s), existing within the very same dynamic, participatory complex. As I set my foot upon the earth, pressing towards an unknowable future, with only the certainty of a deteriorating physicality, I am as an itinerant seed, determined to take hold and materialize, sending forth panoramic tendrils, eagerly reaching into an expanding matrix in time.
Valerie Constantino, Whorling into Time,
digitally enhanced dream image sketch, 2025
Notes
1. Powers, Richard, The Overstory, pg 134
2. Butler, Octavia, The Parable of the Sower, pg 78
3. Finding Quiet Farm, “Gone to Seed,” September 14, 2020
4. Kelly, Lawrence & Zumajo, Cecilia, What Is a Seed? Plant Science, The New York Botanical Garden, April 2, 2021
5. Bonner, Franklin T., Seed Biology, United States Department of Agriculture, USDA Forest Service’s Southern Research Station, Mississippi State, Mississippi
6. Powers, Richard, op cit, pg 139
7. Godsey, Tianna, “The Abundant Life Of Dead (& Dying) Trees,” Natural Lands, February 27, 2023
8. Wuerthner, George, “The ecological value of dead trees,” The Wildlife News, December 20, 2018
9. Lindenmayer, David from Worthington, Leah, “Don't cut them down: Letting dead trees rot can help make new life,” National Geographic, May 31, 2024
10. Simard, Suzanne W., “The foundational role of mycorrhizal networks in self-organization of interior Douglas-fir forests,” Forest Ecology and Management, December 14, 2009
11. Immerwahr, Daniel, “Mother trees and socialist forests: is the ‘wood-wide web’ a fantasy?,” The Guardian, April 23, 2024
12. Soucy, Shannon M., Huang, Jinling, Gogarten, Johann Peter, “Horizontal gene transfer: building the web of life,” Nature Reviews Genetics, V. 16,
July, 2015
13. Walker, Alice, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose, pg 88
Images
1. Jonathan Billinger, Willowherb seed heads, Licensed: CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Willowherb_seed_heads_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4248254.jpg
2. Ximonic (Simo Räsänen), Decaying wood in Rekolanojanpuisto in Rekola, Vantaa, Finland, 2021 April, Licensed: CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Decaying_wood_in_Rekolanojanpuisto_in_Rekola,_Vantaa,_Finland,_2021_April.jpg
3. Aurelien Adoue, Mycelium au devant de la scene, Licensed: CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mycélium_au_devant_de_la_scène.jpg
4. Valerie Constantino, Whorling Into Time, digitally enhanced dream image sketch, 2025
Bibliography
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Link to PDF HERE
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©2025 Valerie Constantino