The Salt Leaf (Redux)

Yesterday was Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer. These days, we tend to celebrate Memorial Day with parades and picnics, fireworks and flags, barbecues and boats. But underneath all the hoopla, there is a somber purpose to Memorial Day. Originally known as Decoration Day, Memorial Day was established during the Civil War to honor all those members of the military who gave their “last full measure of devotion” in service to our country. The essence of Memorial Day is sacrifice.

And so today, I thought we should pause to reconsider the lowly mangrove, that ubiquitous shrub that thrives throughout Florida and in many other tropical climes as well. That the mangrove thrives at all is nothing short of a miracle because it roots in very salty water, water that is, in fact, saline enough to kill most other plant species. How does it do that?

Look closer. Mangrove leaves are a brilliant jade green. But interspersed among all that green finery, there are bright spots of yellow. These are the salt leaves. By a science I do not pretend or presume to understand, these leaves are programmed by Mother Nature to extract enough of the concentrated salt in brackish water to render it sufficiently fresh to nourish the host plant. Theories abound about how this actually works. While some botanists posit that it is the root system of the mangrove that filters as much as 90% of the salt from seawater, thereby providing enough fresh water to feed the plant, other botanists believe that the alchemy of turning salt water into fresh water is done by the salt leaves of the plant. By some evolutionary miracle, each mangrove is programmed to produce a specific number of these leaves, each one capable of excreting an enormous quantity of salt through glands on their surface. In effect, the mangrove’s salt leaves sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the host. I like that second theory a lot.

Years ago, I spent a morning trying to count the number of salt leaves on a given plant. It was a futile effort. The roots of a mangrove ecosystem are so intertwined that it is impossible to distinguish one plant from another, and anyway, after a while, they all began to look alike. So I did the next best thing: I estimated. Best guess? Maybe one leaf in a thousand is a salt leaf. Even if I’m off by a factor of ten, that’s still quite a burden for a single tiny yellow leaf to bear.

Yesterday, on the last Monday in May, we observed yet another Memorial Day. It’s the only day of the year when we officially remember and honor all the men and women who were, and are, our nation’s salt leaves. It is through their sacrifice that the rest of us are blessed to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

There is another interesting aspect to the mangrove: the locals say it “walks.” Thanks to all  those yellow salt leaves, as the mangrove thrives, its root systems spread. Silt collects among those new roots, and eventually new land begins to form, land that becomes host and home to an amazing variety of new plants and animals. Life begetting life.

Thank those who make the ultimate sacrifice. Thank the salt leaves.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine.

His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.