How will the flower bloom in 2100?
Annelie Berner in collaboration with Monika Seyfried
This post documents the initial research during the project Plant Futures, as part of an art residency with EMAP at M-CULT in Helsinki, Finland
Plant Futures is an artistic research project into Helsinki’s nature, seeking to understand how the flora will shift in the face of future climate changes. Rather than focusing on the stories of climate change on a macro level — wildfires, floods — we want to uncover the stories of climate change on a micro level that could eventually shape our familiar surroundings into something entirely new. Looking at just one flower, what does it need to survive and how might those needs be impacted by climate change? How might changes in the local landscape affect our emotional connections with our surroundings, our sense of place?
As the future conditions change around us, as the sun shines more or less, as the clouds roll in and out, as the rain pours down or waits, breathless, for a gust of wind to sweep a shift in the weather, how will this one plant experience those changes? The lines that sprawl out from any climate model give us an intangible range of possible futures. Each line determines our future everyday landscapes and experiences, the pops of colour that burst from buds, the shape of a petal in the spring of 2100.
Needs to meet
But in order to understand future impacts we have to try to understand the present system. What do plants need to live at all, disconnected from climate change?
Through photosynthesis, plants transform water, sunlight and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugars that fuel the plant’s growth. Nitrogen makes up part of chlorophyll, the green cells that allow the plants to perform photosynthesis. It also forms part of the roots, therefore enabling the plant to take up nutrients and water. In sum, plants need water, sunlight, carbon dioxide and nitrogen as well as the right personal conditions of amounts of light, temperature, types of soil, other nutrients and of course, time. Some of these plant needs, some elements of their systems, will change as climate changes: temperature, water, carbon dioxide. Others will change in reaction to those first climate changes: light will change in relation to cloudier winters and in relation to which plants survive or die back, space in relation to the latter as well.
A decline, a rise
Together with the local biologist, our collaborator Aku Korhonen, we walk through the dense spruce forests of Haltiala, we hear of how the Norwegian spruce is declining in the face of rising temperatures and accompanying pathogens, and as we make our way through the wet, dark, cool air, we come to clearing upon clearing where the spruces lay, their trunks cracked, their branches covering the forest floor. We hear of how the hylcomium splendens, splendid feather moss, dries out when its shelter (the spruce) falls, the sunlight pouring through the new openings in the canopy.
And yet we hear of how the circaea alpina, usually rare in Helsinki, has been spotted more frequently, its bright white flowers opening under the palm ferns along the moist, mossy bogs. We never see the circaea alpina, though we hunt for hours, and it becomes the mythical creature around which we circle again and again. What conditions does it like? When does it flower? How does it appear when at its most healthy? How does it appear at its weakest?
The climate in Helsinki will become warmer, cloudier in the winter, sometimes dry for days in the summer, sometimes punctuated by heavy precipitation. How will the circaea experience these shifts? Could it thrive anyway, succeeding in its quiet, reserved way? Or perhaps the fresh wet of the forest feeds its thirst, but it must shine more brightly to attract pollinators from the sunshine of the new clearings. Perhaps the plant itself will show us future climate conditions if we amplify its otherwise infinitesimal change.
How to see
In order to understand the future circaea, we wonder how botanists have come to understand plants in the past and present. Looking through high powered microscopes to grasp the inside of the plants, or watching their growth patterns with computer vision, one can literally watch as a plant morphs, leaning towards the sun as it appears in their skies, reaching their roots towards sources of nutrients and water. Travelling to botanical archives, experiencing the meticulous, historic approach of observing by sketching and preserving, sifting through piles of circaea that have been collected over the years.
Circling back to our desks, we immerse ourselves in the warming trends, the dry days, the heavy wet of the rain that falls in the summer of 2100. Again, we wonder, now with our minds filled with images of the past and present, what would the circaea need in that future, and how different might it be from how it is now? Embracing the uncertainty of the plant’s futures, we begin to collect the strategies of survival that the circaea might use to continue to shine through the forest.
Stay tuned! We will continue to share our research and process.
