Jumping beans

My seed beans failed to germinate and I had no more to plant. Then I remembered that we  still had some beans we bought (to eat) in a market in Georgia two years ago so I thought I'd give them a go. I put some on damp paper in the airing cupboard and did they go! Some of them jumped right up as you can see. They are demonstrating tropisms, the biological  impulse to grow or turn in response to an environmental stimulus. So the root goes down in response to gravity (geotropism) and the shoot goes up towards light (phototropism) ensuring that the emerging plant can access water and nutrients in the ground and sunlight above in order to photosynthesize. 


The Bean Eaters by Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.   
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,   
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes   
And putting things away.

And remembering ...
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.


(Gwendolyn Brooks, who died in 2000, was the first Black woman to be Poet Laureate of the USA.  Her understated words bring to mind the very sort of elderly, disadvantaged, impoverished, unsupported  people who are so disproportionately being wiped out by the current pandemic.)