I looked at the watermelon plant we have growing out our back door the other day. I marveled at the complexity of that plant and what it was doing. The watermelon plant is a vine. It has a central root and runners that grow upwards of 20 or more feet from the main stem. Unlike some runner plants, it relies solely on the central root system and not on sucker roots that grow from the runners.
Our plant has three or four melons on it. The melon vine is busy manufacturing sugar and transporting it to the melons. It also is busy gathering water and transporting it to the melons. In fact, everything the vine is doing, it is doing for the melons that are hanging on it right now.
I wondered how it knew to shuttle the sugar manufactured in a runner over here to a melon on another runner over there. I wondered how it manufactured the red flesh inside the melons and how it manufactured that pigment. I also wondered how it could continue to stuff water into a melon that is already about 90% water. Normally, water flows from the greater to the lesser. In this case, it seems to be flowing from the lesser to the greater because the roots of the plant are in soil that certainly is not 90% water.
I probably will have to continue wondering. The fountain of all information (the Internet) only talks about something called transpiration, which is how trees get water from roots to leaves. That says nothing about how to stuff an already soaked melon with still more water.
Someone smarter than I am will have to explain it to me some day.
2 comments:
If this publishes, I'll type my comment. I don't want to type it all out if it's not gonna work!
Oooo it worked. I dunno what I was doing yesterday that I couldn't leave anything on here. ANYHOW, after all that, I forgot what I was gonna say. Oh yeah. Your observations regarding something as "simple" as a watermelon vine are well-noted. It reminded me of how Rebekah is thrilled, yes, absolutely thrilled, with Phoenix. And part of the thrillage is her appreciation of how beautifully intricate Phoenix's colors are. As I said to Linda, didn't God make a pretty snake!
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