Lazarus Pawpaws

A "Lazarus species" is a species that has long been thought to be extinct, but then it turns out that someone discovers that the species still exists, still lives somewhere. So it has the appearance, though not the reality, of coming back from the dead like Lazarus from the Bible. The linocut print that I've made here, of a raven adding a fossilized trilobite to its trilobite collection, is something I imagine taking place in Millard County, Utah. That's my wildest dream--a raven exhibiting culture by treating fossilized trilobites (animals that dominated the world during the Cambrian era some half a billion years ago) as if they were tokens or trinkets to be collected and even exchanged with other ravens. My wild dream beyond this wildest dream: that the trilobite were to achieve status as a "Lazarus species" by being discovered, alive, scuttling around in some hot spring down in Millard County. (Why Millard County? Because that county is home to the famous fossil trilobite beds of Antelope Springs.)

But this blog post is titled "Lazarus Pawpaws" rather than "Lazarus Species." That's because of what's happened recently with the batch of twenty-four pawpaw seeds I planted on 29 March 2018. As you'll recall from that blog post, I tried scraping the seed coasts against the pavement before planting them, with the aim of helping the little plants come out of their shells (something they had a problem doing when I planted seeds in 2017). But by the beginning of July, scraping the seed coats had seemed to be a phenomenal, colossal failure, since none of them had germinated. I removed the seedlings from the sun and placed them under the carport and stopped watering them. That was that, I thought--they were extinct. 

But this blog post is titled "Lazarus Pawpaws" not "Extinct Pawpaws," so my carefullest readers will already be anticipating what happened next. On or about the date of 13 July, I looked down at the containers and saw that a few pawpaw plants were germinating! Oh Lazarus of plants!

After seeing that there were three seeds that successfully germinated in spite--not because--of my experiment in scraping their seed coat, I returned the 2018 batch of seeds to their place out on the porch and resumed watering them.

Here they are, Lazaruses in the foreground, adjacent to the pawpaw seedlings of 2016. And in the distance, partially obscured by the pot in which the big cactus resides, are the seedlings of 2017. (Still further in the distance, out in the lawn, is the Wells pawpaw cultivar.)