Right around this time of year we wait, buckets at the ready, for the west wind to blow and the sap to start rising. It rises through capillary action, an intricate push me-pull-you combination of physical and chemical forces that the stately tree and the lowly shoot alike put together to josh water through the thinnest of canals up to where the sun is warming and expanding the buds.

When tapping a tree you are harnessing for your own purposes of sweetening pancakes one of those rare times when water runs uphill that are so indispensably useful for life — a wonderful bit of natural technology that makes it possible to translate the energy of the sun into a strong network of fibers that makes a tree that produces oxygen. I read that someone has been able to convert the energy of the sun into liquid fuel — mimicking thereby the entire evolution of the plant kingdom which does exactly that, tie down carbon, and adding to it the pressure cooker of geology that produces the handy-dandy hi-energy package called oil with which we are now looking to stop this process.

The water is called up into the tree to move spring onto the stage against the stranglehold of winter. And when it comes, as I imagine it does every time the temperature of the day dares to aspire to the melting point of ice, water rushes in to fill the spaces between the crackling bits of air that set my teeth on edge in the deepest winter.

Much as I love snow and ice, I’d prefer it if we could make sure spring would always come and sap flow and green leaves and then grass emerge.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bionic-leaf-makes-fuel-from-sunlight/