I live on a small rocky island. It’s geologically very new—less than one million years, they think—and as a result the soil is very thin. Most places, you dig down just a few inches and you hit solid rock; in the past, only subsistence farming was possible here, and that with a Herculean level of endless labor. Attempts to grow cash crops here in the 18th and 19th centuries inevitably failed, because there just isn’t enough fertile soil to support it. Even today, most food grown here is hydroponic or uses drip irrigation in heavily-supplemented containers. Life comes from death, and there just haven’t been enough deaths since this island was formed to result in the kind of deep, fertile soil that allows widespread agriculture. But give it time.
There is a flower that grows here—like everything here, and I guess everything pretty much everywhere, imported. Its name is Catharanthus rosea, or Madagascar periwinkle. It’s pretty but not beautiful, with thin woody stems and delicate petals:
I tried to grow one once in my garden, and I killed it.
But unassisted, it grows all over our island, in soil, in sand, in rocks, and even in cracks in the concrete. Silly fragile flower, it is easy to think, in this struggle between your softness and the hardness of stone, who are you that you possibly think that you can win?
The flower does not argue. She just keeps reaching her petals towards the sky.
The modern name for this species, Catharanthus, has the Greek word for purity in its stem. It’s the same root as in “catharsis,” and in the name of the Cathars, a persecuted and abstemious sect that believed, among other things, in the irredeemable evil of the entire natural world. But I don’t see it. I look at the humble little Catharanthus with her tenuous roots in the rocks, and can’t see anything but goodness.
But she’s poisonous, you know. Her pink petals are filled with vinca alkaloids, which bind to tubulin, a protein in human cells that allows them to divide. Vinca alkaloids stop our cells from being able to reproduce. If you eat them, they cause all sorts of damage to your immune system and your nerves, not to mention the rapidly-dividing cells in your intestines. The Cathars thought you shouldn’t eat any animals, but that plants are fine. But there are are very few animals that kill you if you consume them, and very many plants that do.
Of course, that’s the reason why there are so many plants that are toxic to animals, is because animals kill plants by eating them, and being poisonous is the only thing that a poor, fragile, fixed little flower can do to resist. So many plants—especially the brightly-colored, pretty ones—have evolved to be toxic to animals, their beauty as a sign of their danger. There’s no purity here: no pure goodness, and no unalloyed bad. I think the current scientific name Catharanthus is something of a misnomer.
Because they’re so good at stopping our cells from dividing, vinca alkaloids were investigated as an anti-cancer drug starting in the 1960s. Today, they’re a mainstay of leukemia treatments, and a major reason for the massive improvement in leukemia survival that’s been observed over the past few decades. The year I was born, over 90% of children diagnosed with leukemia died of it; now that ratio is flipped, and the poison from my pretty little flower can take most of the credit for that.
The name of the poisons, the vinca alkaloids, are taken from the old scientific name of the flower: Vinca rosea. Vinca comes from the Latin verb “vincere,” which translates as: to triumph, to conquer, to overcome. That’s where her common name, “periwinkle,” comes from, too—the Latin “v” is pronounced like an English “w.” “Peri-,” in Latin, means “completely” or “thoroughly.”
The roots of the flower burrow wordlessly into the cracks of the stone, little by little creating soil that, in time, could support other plants. In her leaves she is turning light and water into into food, and in her deadly petals is the cure for cancer. She as an individual will one day surely die; but her triumph over the rock, which was never alive, will be complete.
Silly brittle stone. Who are you to think that you could ever win against such persistence?