Plants Act as a Sponge, Capturing Rainfall
If we fill up our spaces with plants, they will cast shade, exude cooling water vapor and serve as a sponge, capturing the rain (and dew) that falls.
In Louisville, Kentucky, we are three weeks into a dry spell and a heat wave. After an unusually wet spring, we are staring down the barrel of a no-rain June. But plants are going to save us from some of the extremes of hot and cold, wet and dry.
Here’s how that works.
Below is most of my new pollinator garden, just planted three weeks ago. Below that, I want to show you the water that appears on one plant, a Maximilian sunflower.
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Note the water on the leaves of this plant. At first glance, I thought it had rained. But then I remembered, it had not rained.
And yet … the plant has water on it.
This water must be from the dew.
This is 9:00 AM on a hot, dry day. The water drops appear because the plant is there to catch them. If there were no plant, those water drops would not have appeared.
The moral of the story is this: Water is ubiquitous, but we need plants to engage with the water.
No plants, no water. Without plants, the water goes away. Without plants, water becomes unmoored from natural water cycles.
How do plants engage with natural water cycles? If we answer that question, then we will know why we need more plants.
Think of a forest. The forest does the following things in relation to water cycles.
The forest causes water to evaporate. Trees and plants transpire (perspire) water, just like people. When they transpire, they pump a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere for future rainfalls. Without this evaporation future rain would not be possible.
The forest also causes condensation, another vital part of the water cycle. When trees and plants transpire water, they emit bacteria and organic compounds that make condensation possible. So the forest causes condensation.
Condensation leads to cloud formation.
Cloud formation leads to precipitation, partly because partly because a raindrop is more likely to reach the ground in the forest, where it is cool and moist. Otherwise, it would be more likely to evaporate before hitting the ground.
Forests also act as a sponge, to capture rainfall. If you clear the forest, you remove the ability of the forest to capture rainfall. But the forest soaks up the rainfall and holds onto it, making it available to plants, soil, insects and beneficial fungi.
ALL PLANTS DO THIS
But it’s not just forests. All plants perform all of these functions. They cause evaporation, condensation, cloud formation and precipitation. And they act like a sponge.
In addition to being a sponge, a fully functioning forest—like all plants—is a cooler. It cools its surroundings because it transpires (perspires) water. All plants exude water out of their leaves. When this water evaporates, it creates a cooling effect.
In addition, a fully functioning forest—like all plants—is a hot/cold pack. When it’s cold, it tends to stay cold. And when it’s warm, it tends to stay warm. It’s slow to warm up and slow to cool down. This way, the forest avoids the extremes of hot and cold. By contrast, a desert, which lacks water, gets very hot in the day and very cold at night.
This is not just true of forests that are “out there” but also the small forests that can exist in our home landscape.
Pictured below is my backyard forest, which features a crowded mass of green leaves.
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Every leaf is a solar powered air conditioner, because every leaf is constantly transpiring water. That water is constantly evaporating, creating a cooling effect.
Evaporating water does that. It creates a cooling effect, like when you step out of the shower or the swimming pool. It feels cold because water is evaporating. That’s why a shade tree or a forest feels cool. And that’s why we should seek to let plants grow everywhere, to cool, to regulate and to moderate our temperatures.
As opposed to what?
As opposed to constantly mowing, spraying, cutting and weeding, often for reasons we know not why. We mow, spray, cut and pull weeds out of social pressure, more than any legitimate need. There’s a time to mow, spray, cut and weed. But we do way too much of that without good reason.
We thereby deprive ourselves of the many benefits of plants, including benefits to the climate, benefits to our soil, benefits to our waterways and benefits to our wildlife.
The call to action is to grow more plants, starting in your home landscape and garden.
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If this material is of interest to you, I want to cordially invite you to my next free webinar and the course, called Healing Our Land & Our Climate
To attend the free webinar or the course, please click on the link and register.
The idea is that we must Heal Our Land if we expect to Heal Our Climate. We will explore the many ways to heal our land, starting in our home landscapes. But we will also travel around, virtually, with people who have healed the land on their farms. We will follow author Judith Schwartz, farmer Gabe Brown, geologist David Montgomery and biologist Anne Bicklé as they tell us stories of ecological restoration around the world.
You will discover that Healing Our Land is fun, fascinating and rejuvenating.
Here’s why.
As a species, we evolved to be close observers of nature. We depended on the land, the plants and the animals for our next meal, so we had to understand what we were looking at. We take pleasure in looking at nature and understanding what we see.
Unfortunately, the industrial revolution moved most of us indoors, where we spend our days in a decidedly unnatural environment. But we long to get back to nature. That’s why many of us engage in hobbies that get us back to nature, including gardening, farming, hunting, fishing, hiking, camping and bird watching.
Which is to say that it’s fun to think about the natural world and engage with the Earth. In Healing Our Land & Our Climate, we will talk about the natural world, and think about how to restore the natural world, where we live, work, play and farm.
To see what it’s about, check out the webinar and course Healing Our Land & Our Climate.
Hope to see you there!