Breakfast of campions

One summer day around 32,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, an arctic ground squirrel stopped to sniff the Siberian wildflowers and nibbled on little white campions gone to seed. As the squirrel digested his breakfast on the banks on the River Kolyma, we will never know how his life abruptly ended. Did a flood cover his burrow? Did a mastodon tread on his home, grinding him into the earth? Too much ice to burrow through, come spring thaw?

Enter Time present: in 2007, the squirrel’s tiny body, buried 12 stories deep, still asleep in his burrow, was recovered from the melting permafrost with hundreds of seeds still in his gut. And a well stocked larder, a seed cache for the coming winter. Russian scientists sorted and counted the seeds.  

Years later, enter Svetlana from the Russian Academy of Sciences who tried her luck at resurrecting the seeds, she extracted placental tissue and nurtured the silene stenophylla embryos along. Sure, it was a longshot. Damned if the 32,000 year-old Methuselah seeds didn’t sprout and grow leaves. All 36 seeds sprouted and bloomed in profusion all at once like good little Soviets as if they were thrilled to be free from the permafrost at last. Not a false spring—like so many others.

Winter was finally over. The little white campion flowers bloomed for the first time in 32,000 years. The lab was perfumed with a spicy clove-cinnamon odor as they unfurled their finery and went about the business of pollination. Svetlana and her sable hair brush did the honors. A squirrel, a freaking carnation. A regeneration of the world’s oldest seeds. Talk about bloomin’ luck. It was like Lazarus rising from the dead. Nostrovya, they said.

I love this story of silene stenophylla, a.k.a. white campion. 

I remember finding bladder campion in Wengen, the Swiss Alps in 1972— it had little pink and white candy stripes on its bladder as if it was the frilly apron, or fancy bloomers worn by a volunteer nurse. I was lonely working as a waitress, in a hotel one summer, without a common language. So I turned to that of flowers. 

The campion, a silene, was similar to an Indian pink (actually a scarlet wildflower with pinked, or sheared decal edges), that I knew from West Marin. Gentian and chicory I recognized. Dandelions and buttercups, eiderweiss and pearly everlasting. But there were so many flowers I didn’t know, I was hooked. It got me interested in botany. 

That summer I collected, pressed and dried alpine flowers between the pages of old books. Though I was desperate for my mother tongue, I forfeited my novels weighted down under the legs of my bed, they had a more important job— preserving flowers. I didn’t know the names of most of the flowers—other than edelweiss and gentian, heather and clover. But the silly silene, a card-carrying member of the pink, or carnation family, (Caryophyllaceae) is what kicked off my interest.

Some say that the carnation stands for fascination, and others say for love, whether filial or maternal. Agape. According to one legend, white carnations grew from the Virgin Mary's tears as she wept for her son hanging on the cross. 

But the red ones were the eyes of the shepherd that Diana, the huntress, plucked from his head for throwing her off her game. Dianthus: either way, is the flower of the goddess. White for luck and pink for gratitude and red for revolution. I remember buying carnations from the street vendors in Red Square keeping their fragile blooms warm in little glass houses lit by candles, snow falling like feathers on the corpse of a failed experiment.

A few years ago, I was hiking in the deep canyons above Santa Barbara, headed towards the top of the ridge. I was winded and grateful for a chance to rest—I was on my hands and knees with nose pressed to the ground. Right in front of me, on the umpteenth switchback, was a plant I’d never seen before, pink, like a carnation, but thorny. 

It reminded me of those alpine campions. My memory wandered back to those good old days, hiking in the Swiss Alps, startling other hikers who found me on my hands and knees by the side of the trail, doing a faceplant. I later realized I was looking at a member of the Cichorieae (Dandelion) tribe. Santa Barbara wire lettuce. Not a campion, but close enough—call it convergent evolution. Even way back then, I was always looking for equivalencies. Call it simile. Or perhaps metaphor.

• Summer's End in the Alps
• USSR journal, Russian New Year’s, Eve, Scrying the future
• With thanks to Marc Nassar’s FB post.