The Crowded Pot

The sunflowers in the big pot were dying, and the ones in the trash can were fine.

Maya crouched in front of both. Same seeds. Same soil bag. Same week of planting. Soren had divided them carefully back in May, eight seeds in the nice clay pot, eight crammed into an old metal bucket because they ran out of pots.

"It should be the other way around," Soren said. He had his notebook open against his knee. "The bucket ones are crowded. They should be losing. Less room."

"They're taller," Maya said.

"They're taller and the pot ones are yellow."

They had assumed the crowded ones would suffer. That was the whole idea. More plants, less to go around, somebody loses. The bucket should have been a slow-motion fight to the death.

Maya tipped the clay pot sideways and slid the whole root ball out onto the grass. The roots were a thick white snarl, wound around and around the inside of the pot like somebody had been wrapping yarn for a year.

"They went down," she said. "And around. So much root."

Soren wrote: pot roots = huge.

Then they did the bucket. It took both of them, Maya pulling, Soren tapping the bottom. The plug of soil came out in one piece. The roots were there, but thin. Modest. Not a fraction of the tangle in the pot.

"That's backwards," Soren said. He looked at the pale wrestling mass on the grass, then at the calm thin roots in the bucket. "The healthy ones grew less root. The dying ones grew more."

Maya sat back on her heels. She had the look she got when something was wrong in a way she liked.

"Where'd the seeds come from," she said. Not really a question.

"The pot ones are from the packet. The big mixed packet." Soren flipped back a page. "And the bucket. The bucket ones were from the flower last year. The one by the fence. We saved them off the one head."

Maya stopped moving.

"All of them?" she said. "The whole bucket is from one flower?"

"One head. We shelled it out at the table, remember, you spilled them."

"So the bucket is brothers and sisters." Maya picked up a thin bucket root and held it like it might mean something. "And the pot is strangers."

Soren stopped writing.

They sat with it. "That can't be it," Soren said, which was what he said when he thought it might be it. "Plants don't know who their family is. They don't know anything. They don't have eyes."

"They don't need eyes," Maya said. "They're touching. Underground. The whole bottom of the pot, the roots are touching everybody else's roots."

"Touching isn't knowing."

"It is if they can tell whose roots they're touching."

Soren chewed his pen. He hated this and he loved it. "How would a root tell. There's nothing down there but dirt and water and roots."

"And whatever the roots are putting into the dirt," Maya said. "Roots leak stuff. They have to. They breathe out the bottom."

He wrote that down because it was true and he hadn't thought of it. Roots release chemicals into the soil around them, all the time. A root sitting in the dark, surrounded by the chemical signatures of its neighbors. A root that could read those signatures.

"So a stranger root tastes a chemical it doesn't recognize," Soren said slowly, "and it goes, threat, grow, grab everything before that other guy does. And it grows like crazy. And so does the stranger next to it. And they all just dig and dig."

"And drain the pot," Maya said. "And turn yellow."

"But a sister root tastes a chemical it does recognize." He stopped. "And it doesn't fight."

They both looked at the bucket plants. Tall. Easy. Eight plants from one mother, standing in less soil than the dying eight, not one of them wrestling the others for it.

"They felt their family in the dark," Maya said, "and they decided not to be greedy."

"You can't say decided."

"You say it then."

Soren tried. He looked at his notebook. He looked at the eight calm green stems. He couldn't find a word that wasn't decided that also wasn't a lie. "They held back," he said finally. "They knew, and they held back. For each other."

Maya was very quiet. She was thinking about something that wasn't the sunflowers, and Soren could tell, so he waited, which was a thing he was good at.

"Everybody always says crowded is bad," she said. "Like more of you in one place means you all do worse. The whole point of the experiment was the crowded ones lose." She touched the tall bucket plants. "But it's not about crowded. It's about who you're crowded with."

Soren felt the back of his neck go strange. He thought about his own classroom, twenty-eight kids elbow to elbow, and how some rooms felt like a fight for the same water and some rooms didn't, and how he had always assumed that was just luck or mood and not something real, not something you could measure in the length of a root.

"The relatives knew they could share," he said. "Because sharing with your sister isn't losing. Her growing is kind of you growing."

"That's the seeds," Maya said. "Same flower. If your sister makes seeds, that's half your same self, out in the world." She turned to him. "The plant doesn't have to want anything. It just grew the math."

Soren wrote: it grew the math. Then he stopped writing, because the inside of his head wasn't too small this time. It was exactly the right size, and the thing was sitting in it, warm.

They replanted the bucket eight into the ground along the fence, spacing them out the way you were supposed to.

Then Maya stopped, knelt, and shoved two of them back together until their stems nearly touched.

"Leave those two close," she said. "They're family. Let's see if they share above the ground too."

Soren got down beside her and pressed the soil firm around the two leaning sisters.