Standing on a beach, I stare at the cliff.
A thin, black layer waxes and wanes in its sedimentary sandwich.
You have to get your eye in, but once you’ve seen it
You can follow this line through the rocks,
Where a catastrophic storm devastated a forest.
Huge trees came crashing down, and were washed downstream
Leaving logjams and debris.
A generation lost, all lost to decay,
Except for this tiny graveline.
I’m here to dig with a dessert spoon
To scoop out some deep time into an airline sick bag,
Plastic-lined to keep the history inside.

When I’ve collected enough
I take my muddy sick bag to a top-spec, spick-and-span lab,
tip it into a bucket
And pour on plenty of hot water,
Breaking down the earth. Oddly enough, the remains look like tea leaves.

Here I am, a fossil plant,
That dinosaurs once foraged on
Now stone-matured and so be warned
Make tea, drink me if you want
But I’m gritty with knowledge.

If hot water isn’t enough
I’ll add a hint of potassium hydroxide
Hydrofluoric acid will clean any rock off the tea-leaves - carefully, this stuff is like Alien blood,
A drop of this would eat straight through my bones,
It dissolves anything except plastic and the precious preserved plants.
I sieve out the fossils and I put them under the microscope.

Sort me. Find the interesting species
In the mess of history. Unweave ginkgo tree
from pine, unwind fragment and debris
From the wholer shape of leaves,
Hold on to these. Lift them free.

Look. You can see a cute little layer
called the cuticle, so waxy and waterproof it’ll
Resist the tooth of time and if you shine
Light through, it’ll still light up for you. Outline
The ancient cells I once used to infuse
Fresh air in my greenness. These holes
I could open and close to control water flow,
Tiny mouths to breathe the air.
Listen. You can almost hear
The petrified whisper of a bygone breeze.

I recognise this ginkgo. There is a living species like this tree, a single survivor.
Cultivated by Buddhist monks for thousands of years,
Since then it’s learned to live a city life, resilient and adaptable.
They’ve had to adjust as we’ve changed their world.

My thin beachrock line made of flash-flooded fossils
Has mountainous brethren: thick coal-beds, colossal
Bogs, woods and forests that lived back when mould
Was outpaced; when plant waste packed up uncontrolled.

Men dug up these graveyards and set them on fire.
Air’s carbon dioxide proportions rose higher
As millions of years of old woodlands were burned;
Meanwhile, the leaves of the ginkgo trees learned

They needed far fewer leaf-mouths to breathe in
The carbon they capture, where Victorian
Samples have holes packed much closer together
A trait most trees share: it’s not new-grown, just clever.

We can take our survivors and grow them in labs, with different kinds of air,
Mapping the precise relationship between carbon and mouths
And comparing this to their fossil brethren

Over deep time, the carbon levels we read from these leaves swoop and fall.
We can tell the story of carbon in many ways,
But the tea-leaves tell us the tale from the plant’s point of view.
They are exquisitely-tuned environmental sensors scattered through time.

You’re incinerating centuries of forests each day,
The living trees above the ground, the dead woods below,
You’ve burned to expand.
Putting us all in hot water,
Adding acid to our oceans,
Stripping away the earth.

Can you learn from the ginkgo
How to moderate your mouth in the face of excess
How to sense the changes around
How to adapt in a balancing act
That roots us in a lineage of millenia?

Because from the fossil point of view
You’ve made this huge mess of life in no time at all
When you haven’t even got your own layer of rock yet.