In Silent Beauty

As anxious as an expectant father, Botanist Ichiro Ohga rushed from Tokyo to a farmyard in Kemigawa town, 25 miles southeast of the city. There, he carefully examined the ripening bud on a lotus plant. Blossoming, decided Dr. Ohga. would be a little premature. He settled down beside the aged iron cauldron that served as a flower pot and waited for the unfolding petals.

Ordinarily a blooming lotus merits no such rapt attention from Professor Ohga, who has been studying the genus for 30 years and is known in Japan as "Dr. Lotus." But this plant, lovingly tended by the doctor's good friend, 69-year-old Soy Saucemaker Moemon Ihara, had sprouted from a seed found in a nearby peat bog, imbedded in a neolithic canoe. Counting on 100 years to form each foot of the 15 feet of peat that covered the seed, and adding 500 years for the layer of topsoil above the peat, Dr. Lotus calculated that his seed was some 2,000 years old.

For four days, while the plant flowered, the patient botanist watched and kept a detailed diary. He saw nothing that he had not seen many times before while studying the modern lotus. "On the first day," he wrote, "it assumes the shape of a sake bottle; on the second, the shape of a sake cup; on the third, the shape of a soup bowl; on the fourth, the shape of a saucer." By the end of the fourth day, the pale pink petals begin to wither and turn brown. Soon, all that is left is the seed pod, splayed out like an upright shower nozzle. "It just goes to show you," said Dr. Lotus, "that plants do not undergo evolutionary changes in 2,000 years. Even the size and color is the same."

Dr. Lotus' observations convinced him of a second point. He did not hear the faint, soft pop of opening petals that has echoed for centuries through Japanese literature. Some years ago on a summer morning, the skeptical scientist dragged recording equipment to the shore of a lotus pond. There he assured himself that the modern flower blooms in silent beauty. Last week he "listened" to a prehistoric plant open to morning sunlight. Smiling till his tiny eyes all but disappeared in his face, he had bad news for sentimentalists: in spite of all that the poets have said, even a 2,000-year-old lotus blossoms without a whisper.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.