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The signature of all things gilbert5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Alma grows up roaming the greenhouses and woodlands of the family estate, and in adulthood remains happiest when flopped on her belly, skirts hiked, admiring the workings of plants. Her father, a British transplant of low birth and high ambition, made an early fortune in botanical pharmaceuticals. Alma Whittaker is a big-boned girl with an unruly cockade of red hair, energy to burn and the good luck to have been born in 1800 to the wealthiest man in Philadelphia. The class was evolutionary botany, and its wisdom makes a handy prerequisite for Elizabeth Gilbert’s expansive new novel, “The Signature of All Things,” about a botanist whose hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin’s century. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. ![]() By “superior” I believe he meant “uncommonly patient.” Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. As for the organisms in our purview, his credo was: It takes a superior mind to appreciate a plant. But hereafter in class, as scientists, we would look to life itself as primary source. If we wanted a secondary source to explain life’s existence, the professor said, we were free to spend extracurricular angst reconciling those conflicting reports. ![]() My most influential college course began with an assignment from the Book of Genesis: we read the two different creation stories that coexist there. ![]()
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