The Wonder called Plants

In Ella I visited the Nine Arch Bridge, an incredibly scenic viaduct bridge through which the train passes. It is thought to be one of the best examples of colonial-era railway construction. The construction of the bridge was thought to have been done by P.K. Appuhami, a Ceylonese builder, in consultation with British engineers. There are many interesting stories surrounding P.K. Appuhamy and the bridge. According to one story when construction work commenced the Great War (World War I) began, and the British reallocated the steel from this site to the battlefront. When the work came to a standstill the locals built the bridge with stone bricks and cement, but without using any steel. Using steel or not, this bridge looks rock solid and though countless trains have passed through it every day for nearly a century works flawlessly.

But the tiresome train journey from Colombo had demotivated me from returning home by train again, so I wondered what I could do. Then I had one of the best ideas I had ever had while traveling: I would go mountain hopping by bus. So I traveled from Ella to Bandarawela and found that it took only about 45 minutes. After walking around in Bandarawela, I took the bus to Welimada and from there I took the bus to Nuwara Eliya. It was unbelievable how flexible and fast buses are compared to trains and the scenery was incredible. From there I went to Peradeniya.

The Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya is located near the Mahaweli River and is renowned for its collection of orchids. There were 4000 different species of plants here but I could only identify a dozen or so trees which was disappointing. Oh their name boards were displayed but for me they were meaningless. What I wanted was a deeper understanding. Though I was no good at it or maybe for this very reason, science has always fascinated me. I have an almost superstitious reverence for it. How in heavens did they send a rocket to Jupiter that revolved around the giant planet gaining enormous speed using the planet's own gravitational pull and was flung in a different direction to the furthest distances of space to study Neptune before leaving the solar system forever without even an astronaut aboard?

Getting back to trees, I’ve always been confused about the different types of plants. I knew vaguely a group called flowering plants, and a group that doesn’t flower like pines. But where do things like ferns and mosses fit in? Are algae plants? Without knowing these I’ve lived happily enough, but in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, they took a certain intriguing importance. So I decided to find out.

All plants can be divided into two groups: Vascular Plants and Non-vascular Plants. Non-vascular plants do not have true roots, leaves or stems. Their name stems from the fact that they do not contain water or nutrient-conducting vascular tissues like the xylem and phloem. Simple plants like Algae and Mosses fall into this category.

Vascular plants on the other hand could be a spore producer like Ferns or a seed producer, like most trees you see around you. Seed producers can be further divided into flowering plants (Angiosperms) and non-flowering plants (Gymnosperms). Cycads and conifers like pines and spruce are Gymnosperms. They together with ferns dominated the world during the age of the dinosaurs. There are only about 700 Gymnosperm species in existence today, but 250,000 species of Angiosperm. About130 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous, flowering plants appeared suddenly and in great diversity. From the little I know about these things it seems odd. But then we only have to see man's own progress to understand how. About 5300 years ago, people with primitive stone tools were stumbling confused upon the Earth. A few thousand years later they were on the moon. It seems this sort of thing happens all the time in the natural world.

Colonialism

 

Take on a wretched land

Turn it into good

Civilize its savages

Re-habilitate if you could

In the cloak of freedom

Hide a show of force

Or in a show of patriotic pride

Hide a greed that’s even worse

Civilize a sullen people

Enter an unknowable land

In the guise of something good

Do something truly bad

Dry its living rivers

Bleed its trees dry

These roads must you have treaded

When you walk into your final night

P.G. Wodehouse

The feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet Jeeves were the creations of the infinitely well-meaning and later on much-misunderstood humorist named P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse’s life at this time was not going well when he joined the London branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He was unsuited for it and found the work baffling and difficult, but he would come every day eager to write for magazines. But between 1908 and 1915, he created unforgettable characters that made him famous. Psmith was a strikingly original character based on hotelier and impresario Rupert D’Oyly Carte, whose monocle, studied suavity and stateliness of speech Wodehouse cleverly adopted for his character. “Something New” became his first farcical novel and also best-seller and although some of his later stories were gentler and lightly sentimental, it was as a farceur that he became known. Later in the same year, "Extricating Young Gussie” about Bertie and Jeeves was published. He wrote about them for the rest of his life.

His unwise broadcasts from German radio to the US, during the Second World War caused great controversy even though they were comic and apolitical. A front-page article in The Daily Mirror stated that Wodehouse "lived luxuriously because Britain laughed with him, but when the laughter was out of his country's heart, ... [he] was not ready to share her suffering. He hadn't the guts ... even to stick it out in the internment camp." Several libraries removed Wodehouse novels from their shelves. Wodehouse never returned to England.

Wodehouse received great praise from many of his contemporaries, including Max Beerbohm, Rudyard Kipling, A. E. Housman and Evelyn Waugh—the last of whom opines, "One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page. However not everyone agreed. The writer Alan Bennet thinks that "inspired though his language is, I can never take more than ten pages of the novels at a time, their relentless flippancy wearing and tedious”. Another literary critic Q.D. Leavis writes that Wodehouse had a "stereotyped humour ... of ingenious variations on a laugh in one place". Sean O’Casey, a successful playwright of the 1920’s called Wodehouse “English literature’s performing flea”. Another critic wrote “It is now abundantly clear that Wodehouse is one of the funniest and most productive men who ever wrote in English. He is far from being a mere jokesmith: he is an authentic craftsman, a wit and humorist of the first water, the inventor of a prose style which is a kind of comic poetry."