This gorgeous green leaf glowing in the sunlight is pickerelweed.  It lives on solar energy, incorporating carbon dioxide into sugar, and converting sugar into everything else.  If it’s like a lot of other plants, about half of its sugar sustains metabolism, and the other half goes into growth and reproduction.  Considering that it emerges from muck and lives in a shallow pond, it is surprisingly clean.

There is no shortage of water for the roots in the bottom of the pond (as long as it’s fresh water).  The plants stay upright with strong cell walls, and with air in the stem that adds buoyancy.  The air-filled stem also provides oxygen to the roots.  Even before the stem reaches the surface in the spring, it is producing oxygen through photosynthesis in its green tissues, filling itself with bubbles and helping it rise upward to the light and keep the roots alive.

The plants produce flowers and seeds, all powered by the green stems and especially the leaves.  And the leaves persist well into autumn, storing as much starch as they can in the roots, preparing to do this all again.  Whether new plants from seeds, or persistent plants from roots, life differentiates itself from the non-living by being able to do it again, and again, and again, what Robert Frost called “The long bead chain of repeated birth.”  So every year, the pickerelweed will rise to expose its beauty, and let us know that life continues to find a way.