Garden of Unearthly Delights

By Peter Stoler

PARALLEL BOTANY by Leo Lionni

Knopf; 181 pages, illustrated; $12.95;paperback $5.95

The chimera, the griffin, the manticore and the sphinx are familiar fauna that flourish outside traditional biology. Now it appears that unfamiliar flora grow outside of conventional botany. Or so says the protean Leo Lionni, 67, teacher, painter, sculptor, former art director of FORTUNE and author of a dozen delightful children's books. To illustrate, Lionni has literalized Marianne Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them"--and then removed the toads. What remains is a series of never-were "parallel plants," a vegetable kingdom with members rooted beyond the fences of nature and logic.

Parallel Botany is the most complete (and only) full-scale guide to this large, bizarre, highly diversified and totally imaginary world. It is also one of the funniest and most brilliant parodies of scientific jargon and scholarship ever published. Standard verdure grows and decays; Lionni's plants do neither. Instead, writes Lionni, they exist outside of time, "like a memory that has taken on actuality." These matterless, insubstantial greens, he notes, "though impervious to any violent acts of nature, disintegrate at the least contact with an object alien to their normal environment, dissolving into dust and leaving only a chemically inert white powder." Spotting the organisms, which fall into two basic groups, tests faculties of the most accomplished observers. "Those of the first group are directly discernible by the senses and indirectly by instruments," explains Lionni, "while those of the second, far more mysterious and elusive, come to our knowledge only indirectly, through images, words, or other symbolic signs." One discernible group of plants is the Tirillus, woodland greenery found in places like the tundras of Ackerman's Land on the equally fictitious Borloff Straits. The species Tirillus vulgaris resembles bread sticks; but a variety, T. mimeticus, assumes the shape and color of its surroundings and thus is permanently invisible. Even more unusual is T. silvador, which grows in the high Andes and emits shrill whistles on clear January and February nights, possibly to warn away llamas that might otherwise tread on it.

These are by no means the most bizarre features of Lionniland. There are, for example, the woodland tweezers, which grow in a pattern the fictitious Japanese botanist Uchigaki has found disturbingly similar to the game of Go. And the black Anaclea taludensis flowers, defiers of the laws of perspective --they shrink as the visitor approaches, then expand as he withdraws. The Giraluna germinates from a point somewhere above the ground; its roots grow down toward but never into the earth. The Artisia is "nonorganic and very likely of human origin." This plant, covered with whirligigs, curlicues and other designs associated with 18th century Baroque, bears a strong resemblance to the productions of certain modern artists. Artisia Calderii recalls the work of the late American sculptor Alexander Calder; Artisia Arpii shows an amazing similarity to the collages of Jean Arp.

With its handsome illustrations, painstaking references to confected folk legends and wealth of bogus footnotes, Parallel Botany is clearly the definitive word on the botanical counterculture, and it is a witty, totally irreverent demonstration of a superior mind at play. It is a pity Lionni's immortal garden does not exist. It is a blessing that the gardener does. -- Peter Staler

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