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By Carina Magyar in Trees —

II: Plantanus

The infinity of five took a long time to find...

duodi, the 2nd of Germinal, Year CCXXXI
The plane tree's fuzzy fruit. Photo by Guilhem Vellut.

Good morning. Today is duodi, the 2nd of Germinal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le platane, an ornamental tree with roots way back in the Paleocene.

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Plane trees are stubborn and common, the pigeons of the tree world in the sense that they're frequently grown as urban trees to liven up otherwise concrete jungles. Planes are remarkably apathetic to air pollution. Their main drawback are the seeds, which wind disperse just like dandelions, and can cause allergic reactions, but these are milder than the reactions caused by trees that wind disperse pollination material. In addition to being hardy, planes have crossbred themselves into knots, forming a cluster of species that are relatively unchanged since the earliest known fossils dating back to just after the dinosaur extinction. They've evolved, of course, but that evolution has created more of a family coral than a family tree, as they keep evolving in circles. An untamed plane tree, when given more space than a sidewalk plot, will grow to enormous, scaly proportions.

Sorry, we're going to do a little math today. A common argument against decimalization of anything, but particularly time, is that aside from matching our number of fingers, ten just isn't a very useful number. It can only be divided one way – in half, to five – and thus doesn't scale upward and downward as neatly as twelve, the number most calendars and clocks are based around. Even this calendar can't resist the allure of the 12-month cycle with its neat divisions into four seasons of three months. You can't get there with ten. Two seasons of five months?

These might seem like elementary discoveries, but I promise I'm not just high and staring at my hand. There's a point to made here that five and ten aren't as inert, mathematically, as simple multiplication rules would have you believe. But we've only just "discovered" this in the past 50 years, and yes, it has to do with planes.

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III: Asparagus

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