I was visiting the UBC Botanical Garden a few months back, doing a little photography and enjoying the ambiance, when I made an interesting observation: most of the photos I was taking were focused on foliage rather than flowers, and the garden seemed to oblige my fixation with an inexhaustible display of rich plant texture, each with its own subtle hue of green.

It began with the Cardiocrinum giganteum, or giant Himalayan lily, a spectacular summer-blooming bulb that takes several years to mature before it bears massive eight- to 10-foot-tall stalks studded with up to 20 fragrant white lilies.

To avoid disappointment, the botanical garden keeps a grove of them, featuring both mature and juvenile plants – because once a bulb blooms, it dies and produces small offspring or offsets.

I knew I was a bit early for the flower display, but the emerging stalks were so impressive with their glossy heart-shaped leaves of an intense lime colour, that I took a photo anyways, and I’m glad I did.

Then I took the underground tunnel over to the alpine garden, only to find more green textures awaiting the camera.

First in line was a curious perennial groundcover called Globularia cordifolia, or globe daisy. I’ll admit that it was the miniscule lavender-blue flowers that initially caught my eye, much in part to their whimsical form. These spherical blooms reminded me of tiny Truffula trees – which to the uninitiated are the focus of the Dr. Seuss (aka Theodor Geisel) children’s book The Lorax – an early pro-environmental allegory and a favourite bedtime story of my daughters when they were young.

A glance beyond these strange appendages revealed dense rosettes of fleshy, spoon-shaped leaves smothering the ground in a rich forest green.

Just up the hill in the alpine garden was an equally impressive display of a contour hugging plant. This time it was Azorella trifurcata, a Zone 6 hardy native of Chile and Argentina. It was used as a mass planting on a steep rocky slope in full sun, where this cushion-forming plant molded itself over the undulating surface, skirting the adjacent boulders. The tiny white flowers were rather insignificant, but the texture was absolutely superb, with the variable light to dark green foliage and shadow play giving a sense of depth rarely seen in plant materials.

All this green got me to thinking about how important those tiny plant cells called chloroplasts are to the very existence of life on this planet.

This point came to the forefront one day when I was perusing my daughter’s marine biology textbook and came across a simplified aquatic food chain. That food chain began with microscopic phytoplankton performing photosynthesis – converting sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and simple sugars. Then the herbivorous zooplankton eat the phytoplankton – the carnivorous zooplankton eat the herbivorous zooplankton – the krill eat the carnivorous zooplankton – the squid eat the krill – the fish eat the squid – the seals eat the fish – right up to the top of the chain, where the killer whales eat the seals. In that entire food chain, there is only one producer, that being the phytoplankton, with the rest of the chain entirely composed of dependent consumers, just like us.

Those humble phytoplankton are actually responsible for 95 per cent of the ocean’s photosynthesis, producing nearly 50 per cent of all the oxygen in our atmosphere Meaning, that all life, both aquatic and terrestrial, relies on a plant process called photosynthesis for their very existence.

Existence or the waning thereof, is at the very heart of a book I’ve been reading lately – Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Road. Set in a post-apocalyptic United States, it is essentially the story of a planet where all plant life has perished, triggering an all-out environmental collapse. If you’ve ever wondered what a world without plants would be like, then I would highly recommend reading it – but be warned, it is a rather grim piece of fiction. At the very least, it should be enough to remind us that plants can live without people (barring an environmental catastrophe caused by us).

We, on the other hand, would quickly expire without our little green friends.

Mike Lascelle is a local nursery

manager and gardening author

(hebe_acer@hotmail.com).