Many years ago a north country girl was caught and feeling rather lost in the realms of the big city. Having moved to Duluth from a land of piney woods, inland lakes and cranberry bogs, the price of a university education included having to be in this noisy, crowded, anonymizing area several thousand times more populated than her homeland.
The starflower’s quiet beauty offered itself like a gateway to finding, spiritually at least, a small patch of home. Growing along a quietly meandering forest creek, the delicate flowers seemed trapped and lost in the confines of the city too. Yet somehow that small pocket of wild beauty survived despite the urban chaos just beyond.
That woodland nook, the starflowers spilling down the small bank to the stream, showed me something I understood then but couldn’t quite put into words until years later. It was the city that was lost, not the small, isolated forest glade. The waters that burbled by, the ethereal beauty of the star-pointed flowers, they were part of something that had been there for millennia, a northern land some of my ancestors were part of too.
The time spent along what I've come to call Starflower Creek created a particularly soft spot in my heart for these flowers, and each time our paths cross, I’m reminded of the teaching they offered back then.
Everything about this plant is delicately pretty from its name to the whorl of leaves whose arrangement remind many of a star to the beautiful white flower that gives the flower its name. Starflowers usually grow in small groups of genetically identical yet physically disconnected plants in an area often up to five feet or more across.
Although starflowers do reproduce sexually, their numbers increase mainly through vegetative cloning. Each summer, a starflower plant sends out an underground rhizome with starch-enriched tips complete with roots and a bud ready for growth in the next year. Nutrients are shunted to these tips throughout the summer. At the end of the season, the rhizome connecting the year’s original plant to its tips decays. Next spring, the tips formed from the previous year will grow and become this year’s starflowers, genetically identical to each other and to the previous year’s “parent” plant.
Botanists, particularly in field guides, talk of vegetative cloning as a form of reproduction, and the original plant is usually referred to as the parent plant. This gives the impression of annual plants who produce offspring for the next year, each year’s plant growth related but individually distinct. Thus each year’s starflower clusters are seen as new generation clusters (so very inappropriately termed “colonies” by Western science).
However, I don’t think this is a clear and accurate description of what is happening. The Western cultural worldview emphasizes individuation, separation, the individual reaching maturity by proving they can stand alone, separate from parents and home communities – part of this may derive from a historical desire for colonists to bud off and colonize other lands. Whatever the origin, as a cultural worldview it influences all forms of Western thought, and this is often found in Western-based field guides.
By contrast traditional Indigenous worldviews around the world while valuing individuality emphasize interconnectedness between individuals and the community, between the generations, between all relations (or species).
If we look at the starflower’s vegetative cloning from this Indigenized perspective, we see something different. Instead of new generations of genetically identical plants (or clones) marching through time from parent to offspring to expand colonies or form new ones, each year’s new plant growth is just that: new growth of the same plant.
Various sources state that individual starflower plants can live for three or more years. As I understand it, in Western science the ramet is the stem, leaves and roots of a "clonal" plant and the genet is the collection of genetically identical ramets that grow from ramets over time. The starflower ramet (a.k.a. "individual plant") can live for three years or more. However, various sources also state that starflower “colonies” (a.k.a. genets) can live indefinitely.
If we shift cultural views from the Western to the Indigenized, we might re-state these observations to read something like this: Starflowers are long-lived plants moving and expanding as individuals (genets) over particular areas. A single starflower being (made up of many ramets) may reach 4-8 inches in height, can grow horizontally to be ten square feet or more*, and is believed to live indefinitely.
Although a direct parallel may not be wise, the trout lily may offer some insight. Like its starflower relative, the trout lily is classified by Western science as a plant that grows in colonies, defined as a cluster of individual "clones" (a.k.a. ramets) that come from parent plants (a.k.a. the previous year's ramets). A trout lily "colony" (a.k.a. genet) is known to live for over 400 years.
Or, in more Indigenized terms, trout lily beings are known to live for 400 years or more.
Confused? That'd be perfectly understandable. Plants grow differently than mammals. As botanist Stefano Mancuso writes in his book Brilliant Green, a plant's body growth is spread out -- its vital organs are not all in one place. If a mammal loses a head or a heart or other vital organ, that mammal is in serious trouble. When a plant loses a part of itself, it's more than likely able to keep on as its vital organs are not concentrated in one place. This helps me understand how a plant being like the starflower can be both one and many plants at the same time.
Another intriguing aspect to starflowers was shared by a guest presenter in one of the forest immersion courses I teach. Dr. Alan Rebertus, a biology professor at Northern Michigan University, referred to the starflower as “a walking plant.” It will never come up in the same place twice, he said. And, even more intriguing, the movement of a starflower “colony” (through annual rhizome growth underground) is not random – it appears to be coordinated growth in a particular direction over time.
In other words, starflower beings not only grow fairly large and live indefinitely, but each starflower being appears to move through annual growth with deliberate intent in a particular direction.
An unpublished, unattributed report "synthesiz[ing] the major scientific works concerning T. borealis [or the starflower]" prepared for the NMU Department of Biology corroborates this. Sexual reproduction in the wild has never been observed with starflowers making starflowers primarily asexual: they "reproduce" through "cloning." In a discussion on the starflowers' asexual form of reproduction, however, the author of the report writes that the "cloning" of the "parent" plant is really not so much a process of plant reproduction as it is a process of plant repositioning. "[I]n reality, the two 'generations' are genetically identical," the report states. "In essence, the plant has only shifted its position not reproduced."
The report also includes other interesting details. It points out that "clonal" ecology as a rule is not well understood, although it seems mobility in clonal plants helps significantly in their ability to survive: when faced with a long-range hostile threat, plants such as the starflower simply move...over time. The problem is that such movement is very slow.
The report also includes a map which shows the Great Lakes as the primary habitat for starflowers.
Given all this, it seems to me starflower beings are both extremely vulnerable to our development-obsessed society and utterly amazing. If I understand the literature correctly, they rarely diversify their genetic composition. Today they only survive in a small range, and in some instances are considered a plant who is under threat. And they move very slowly over time in a particular (individualized) direction.
Plus each individual proliferates itself in space and time as a multi-"generational" cluster. In this way each individual starflower entity or being lives indefinitely.
Sci-fi stories often peer into the depths of space to ask, "Are we alone?" It's obvious from this that humans crave a connection to other intelligent species. But the answer to the question is simple and much closer than its science fiction context seems able to imagine.
It’s been a while since I listened to the stories told by these ancient denizens of the northern forest. When I head out into the woods today, I think I’ll find the time to bide a while with the starflowers. And maybe try to fathom some of the stories these elders have to share.
*No source indicates how large an area they can cover -- this is my conservative estimate from surface observation.
The university in that “…noisy, crowded, anonymizing area….” that you reference is recognized nationwide for its traditionally highly competitive, often championship, collegiate hockey team and a great school in which students can prepare for a variety of post-baccalaureate careers!