Small Miracles

Last fall, Dorothy and I went to Virginia for a tour of Monticello, Mount Vernon, Jamestown, Yorktown and Old Williamsburg. Here, here and here are links to previous posts about the trip. Among them all, I was most fascinated by Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson thought of everything when he laid out the house and the grounds. He had a large gravity clock which had one face outside on the front of the house and another face in the front room, facing in the opposite direction. Think about that for a minute, and understand the engineering that went into the design. The weights themselves required him to put holes in the floor so that they could continue their downward path for a full 7 days. Every Sunday evening, he pulled the weights up to keep the clock running.

There were many, many other parts of the design that were just plain brilliant. I won't list them here, but you can follow this link for a description of the house.

As practical as the design of the house was the design of the grounds. Jefferson was, among other things, a botanist who experimented with thousands of plants during his lifetime. He brought plants back from Europe and from many parts of the colonies, and the descendants of those plants can still be found at Monticello.

One the plants that he kept is known as the Sensitive Plant. A description of the Sensitive Plant in the Monticello catalog can be found here. The interesting thing about this plant is that the leaves fold up when you touch them.

I bought some seeds, and gave the girls some of them for Christmas and kept a few for myself. (I also gave them seeds for Alpine Strawberries that I bought at Monticello. I have grown them before, and if you are able to grow them, you should. Delicious.) Neither of them have been able to get their seeds to sprout, but I planted 5 seeds in 2 pots and now have 3 plants. And as soon as they came out of the ground, I could see a small frond of leaves, and when I touched them, they closed up and lowered themselves to the ground. This from a plant that was so small that I could barely see it.

That was close to three weeks ago. I took this brief movie this morning to show how slowly they are growing, and to show how they react when touched. As they get bigger, I'll follow up with another movie. I'm curious to see how a full-grown plant will react.