Last year I developed a new obsession: soil. Possibly something to do with being covered in it for most of the year either through redoing our garden or taking the boys out and about rain or shine. I then received a message from my friend Jemma (Jemma Foster aka @mamaxanadu) asking if I would write a piece for the Earth issues of her new @wildalchemylab publication, the Wild Alchemy Journal. One of those moments where the Universe aligns as it were.
As we were briefly unlocked during this time, I then wove the subject of soil into various evenings out. After all, this is the earth that gives us plants and stores our water and thus makes our cocktails and the nibbles that go with. This is the substance within which our trees grow to furniture we drink them at. This is the magical element that we connect to with every step along the way, sending electrons through the soles of our feet if we dare take off our shoes.
If you want to know what I’m talking about in more detail, here’s the finished article about Our Fertile Earth. You can also buy a copy of Wild Alchemy Journal here>. Would highly recommend for the content and as a collectable of nature, science and esoterica. It’s brilliantly cosmic. Enjoy X
SOIL
As the pandemic ushered in a sterile way of life, nature writer and artist Sonya Patel Ellis felt compelled to get even closer to the dirty wonder that is our soil
‘The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks’ penned Tennessee Williams at in the conclusion of his phantasmagorical drama Camino Real (1953), a line that struck me at the height of the epidemic and through the cynical political chaos of the past few years as a hopeful metaphor for love, kindness, beauty and nature conquering all.
But lockdown also brought me closer to my own sense of earth: a digging, feeling, sifting exploration of the deep interconnectedness between plants and rock, two vital contributors to the wonder that is soil. They told us to wear facemasks and medical gloves and wash and sanitise our hands leaving them dry and raw. I, like many across the globe, reached for the seeds and in an act of lockdown defiance dug my naked fingers further into the dirt. Things must grow, including a newfound obsession with the Earth’s crust.
Into the pedosphere
Can plants break rock? Indeed they can, as part of the billions of years old process of mechanical weathering (the physical cracking of rocks and minerals) and chemical weathering (the chemical decomposition or dissolution of them) through plant root growth and plant acids as well as water and wind abrasion, ice wedging, pressure release, changes in temperature, hydrolysis, oxidation and carbonation.
Once a rock has been broken down, the process of erosion transports bits of its compositional minerals away, freeing them to combine with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms to create soil – the pedosphere or mantle of Mother Earth. No rock is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion. In fact whole continents have been largely shaped this way, as have many of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders – the Grand Canyon for example – some hundreds of millions of years ago. In direct correlation, some of the planet’s most ancient soil harks back to these times too.
The point at which I learned how long it takes the red-brown, plant-nurturing iteration of soil we are familiar with today to form was a real awe-inspired moment for me, not only in the way in which I now view the dirt beneath my feet but also the added layer of complexity and marvel it brings to the study of plants. Although clay-rich primeval soil developed soon after the formation of the Earth around 4.6 billion years ago, scientists now believe that it was not until over 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, that soil fertility became a factor, the magic formula involving the first terrestrial plants, aided by fungal mycorrhizae in their roots, rapidly sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plants then converted the CO2 into glucose and oxygen via the similarly mind-blowing process of photosynthesis, while mycorrhizae exchanged moisture and mineral nutrients they had gathered from the soil for carbon by way of plant sugars. The first plants also gave back to soil in the form of humus, the dark organic upper layer produced by the microbial decomposition of vegetable and animal matter. Ancestral earthworms – thought to trace their terrestrial evolution back some 200 million years and now standing at over 6,000 species spread across every continent except Antarctica – along with other above-and-below-ground organisms and creatures then helped till the Earth, improving aggregation and porosity. All in all, a symbiotic win-win for plant and fungal growth, soil health, carbon sequestration and the support of numerous other life forms on Earth, including we humans.
The layers of time
Thanks to the relatively young study of soil science we now know that, under natural conditions, it can take up to 1,000 years to make just 2.5cm (1-inch) of topsoil – the upper layer of soil that contains the most organic matter and microorganisms – the exact rate being dependent on factors such as parent material, climate, topography, living organisms and time attributed to weathering. A stop-in-your-tracks fact when you consider how nonchalantly we brush dirt off our shoes or excavate large tracts of it to build our metropolises.
Some of the most ancient known soil is thought to date back to 3.7 billion years ago, found in a metamorphic rock formation in southwestern Greenland when it was exposed beneath a retreating ice cap. Similarly ancient soil has also been located in parts of the African continent, considered to be relatively tectonically stable through geologic time.
The most ancient soil doesn’t equate with the most fertile soil, however. Soil this old doesn’t have the necessary composition of air, water, minerals and organic matter to support plant life. Fertile soil teems with essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (primary macronutrients known as NPK), calcium, magnesium and sulphur (secondary macronutrients) and iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, chlorine and nickel (micronutrients or trace nutrients) plus the non-mineral elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
The process by which it collects all these elements together often involves the large-scale transference of sediment and organic matter hence why some of the most fertile soil throughout history is found in or around river basins and floodplains, or on a substrate known as loess formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust or by the grinding and melting action of glaciers from the last Ice Age.
A sacred resource
It’s no coincidence then that the great plains of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, northern China and the Argentine Pampas form the backbone of the world’s agricultural production where loess blankets the continental bedrock in some places hundreds of metres thick and thousands of years of natural grassland have contributed to the organic content; the soil here is known as mollisol and covers just 7 per cent of the world’s ice-free land.
Or that the ‘cradle of civilisation’ was seeded and grew to fruition in the quarter-moon-shaped ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East, fed as it was by the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile Rivers. Although situated in a dry, arid region, the irrigation provided by these vital water sources via natural annual flooding and manmade ingenuity helped to water crops and initially improve the soil with mineral-rich silt.
Fertile Crescent peoples developed farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat and barley and peas, and rearing sheep, goats, pigs and cows, some of the world’s staple crops and livestock to this day. With increased agriculture came an explosion in population and food surpluses to feed non-farming societal strata: metal workers, scribes, accountants and politicians. And so it went on until the present day.
What our ancient ancestors, or indeed modern science until relatively recently, didn’t fully understand, is that without consistent regeneration, the fertility, health and ecological function of soil will eventually be depleted. Too much of one mineral – an overload of salt in the Nile Delta region for instance – and many plants including key crops cannot survive. Too little organic matter due to soil disturbance, deforestation, monoculture, erosion or climate change and soil’s essential structure and ecosystem can be invariably destroyed. And too blatant a disregard for the immense biodiversity of living organisms that create healthy soil – vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants – and the whole thing will quite literally turn to dust.
Soil is not finite, as many civilisations have found as they literally ploughed themselves out of existence. This includes such soil-related crises as the Dust Bowl of the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s where a failure to employ dry-land farming practices to prevent wind erosion is attributed as a major cause of the drought-related ecological, agricultural and economic devastation that followed. Or soil depletion in Africa where reports show that up to 40 per cent of soils are suffering from some form of soil degradation including erosion, desertification and loss of nutrients.
If we continue to harvest more nutrients then we replace it will take hundreds of years to restore. With the world population currently standing at 7.8 billion and set to rise to what is thought to be its capacity – 10 billion – by 2050 in regards to the Earth’s natural resources we need to collectively start nurturing and replenishing our soil before it runs out so it continues to give back.
Grounding matters
It’s a state of play that’s only just starting to get its much-needed share of the limelight, thanks in part to an increased noise around environmental issues, a burgeoning organic farming and gardening movement, and Illuminating enquiries such as the ground-breaking soil advocacy documentary Kiss the Ground (2020) and books such as David Montgomery’s revelatory Dirt: The Erosion of Civilisations (2012).
It’s also a lot to get your head around while you’ve got your hands stuck into your lockdown pots and borders dreaming of next year’s (hopefully) bountiful crops of tulips, sweet peas and alliums, but it’s certainly worth more than a passing thought. In fact it truly deserves a full-blown, last chance soil fertility rite, bare feet on the ground making contact with Earth’s electrons, giving thanks, worship and nourishment where it’s due.
As any gardener worth their flowers or fruits knows, all healthy, verdant plant life starts with your soil. You might not be able to solve the world’s soil crisis single-handedly but even tending to your own backyard can help. And there’s lots of small-scale mimicking of large-scale solutions that you can do, from composting your way to better nutrients (and recycling waste along the way) to employing no dig gardening styles to planting species that suit the kind of soil you have.
Plant a few violets along the way as a reminder of what matters most: the rock-breaking, nutrient-giving, Earth-loving cycle of life. Your plants, plot and planet will thank you for it and blooming loveliness will be the reward.
Sonya Patel Ellis is a writer, editor and artist exploring the interconnectedness between plants and people and author of The Botanical Bible, The Heritage Herbal and The Garden Birdwatchers Bible. See www.abotanicalworld.com