How a Seed Knows Which Way Is Up

Cress was having a very bad morning.

She had been planted upside down.

Now, if you've never been planted upside down, let me tell you — it is a very confusing way to start your life. Imagine waking up and your pillow is where your feet should be, and your feet are where your pillow should be, and also you're buried in dirt. That's about how Cress felt.

She was a tiny seed, round and reddish-brown, tucked into a little pot of soil on a windowsill. The boy who had planted her — a boy named Oliver — had been very excited and not very careful. He'd pushed her into the soil the wrong way around, patted the dirt down, given her a big splash of water, and said, "Grow, little seed!" before running off to find his roller skates.

So there Cress sat. Upside down. Damp. Thinking.

"Well," she said to herself. "I suppose I should start growing."

She felt a stirring inside her, a kind of stretching feeling, like when you yawn first thing in the morning. A tiny white root began to push out from her shell.

It grew upward.

"Hmm," said Cress. "That doesn't feel right."

And it didn't. The root was heading up toward the surface, toward the air, and something deep inside Cress said: No, no, no. Roots go DOWN.

"But down is up!" Cress argued with herself. "I'm upside down! Down is where the sky is! Up is where the deep dark soil is! How am I supposed to know which way is which?"

She decided to ask someone.

"Excuse me," she called out. "Is anyone there?"

"I'm here," said a voice from the next pot over. It was a bean seed named Bosworth. He had been planted the right way up by Oliver's older sister, who was much more careful about things. Bosworth's root was already poking down into the soil exactly where it should be, and a pale green shoot was reaching toward the light.

"Bosworth!" said Cress. "I've been planted upside down, and I don't know which way to grow. How do you know which way is down?"

Bosworth thought about this for a moment. "I just... know," he said. "I feel it. It's like something heavy inside me is pulling, saying that way, that way, go that way."

"Something heavy pulling you?" Cress repeated.

"Like little bags of sand inside me," said Bosworth, "that sink to the bottom. And wherever they sink — that's down. That's where my roots should go."

Cress went quiet. She concentrated. And sure enough, she could feel it too. Tiny, heavy things inside her cells, settling, drifting, sinking — not toward her root, but away from it. They were falling toward the soil below her, even though she was upside down.

"Oh!" said Cress. "I feel them! They're like little pebbles rolling downhill inside me!"

"Exactly," said Bosworth, sounding pleased.

So Cress did something very brave. She told her root to stop, turn around, and go the other way.

This was not easy. Growing in one direction and then switching is like walking halfway to school and realizing you left your backpack at home. You have to stop, grumble a little, and turn all the way back. But Cress did it. Her root curved in a great slow arc, bending away from the surface and pushing down, down, down into the dark, cool soil below her.

"That's it!" said Bosworth. "That's the way!"

"It feels right," Cress whispered. And it did. The soil was damp and rich, and her root spread out tiny fingers to drink the water there.

But she wasn't done yet. Because now her shoot — her little green stem — was trying to grow downward, into the deep soil, away from the light.

"Oh no," said Cress. "Not you too."

The shoot seemed confused. Cress was upside down, after all, and the shoot had started heading in the wrong direction, just like the root had.

"Stems go UP!" Cress told herself firmly. "Toward the light! Toward the sun!"

She could feel it — just the faintest warmth from above, filtering down through the soil. It was far away and dim, but it was there. The sun. She wanted it the way you want a glass of cold water on a hot day. She wanted it the way you want someone's voice telling you it's all right when you wake up from a bad dream.

So she turned her shoot around too. It curved and twisted, bending in a great loop, heading up through the soil instead of down. It pushed past crumbs of earth and tiny stones. It squeezed through gaps and wiggled around pebbles.

"You can do it!" called Bosworth, who had already broken through the surface and was enjoying the sunshine.

"I'm... trying..." Cress puffed.

It was hard work. Bosworth's stem had gone straight up, easy as anything. Cress's stem looked like a question mark. Like a curly slide at the playground. Like a letter C — for Cress.

And then—

POP.

A tiny green loop of stem pushed through the surface of the soil and uncurled in the morning light.

"I MADE IT!" Cress shouted.

The sunshine hit her, warm and golden, and Cress stretched out two tiny seed leaves, round and green, and tipped her face toward the window. She had never felt anything so wonderful in her entire short life.

"Well done," said Bosworth quietly.

Oliver came running in a few minutes later, still wearing his roller skates, and skidded to a stop in front of the windowsill.

"LOOK!" he yelled. "My seed grew! My seed grew too!"

He pressed his face close to the pot and stared at Cress with enormous eyes. Cress stared back with no eyes at all, but with a feeling of enormous pride.

"Yours is all curvy," said Oliver's sister, peering over his shoulder. "You must have planted it upside down."

"Oops," said Oliver.

"It didn't matter," said his sister, looking impressed. "It figured it out."

Oliver touched Cress very gently with one finger. "Sorry about that, little plant," he whispered. "You did a really good job."

Cress couldn't answer, of course. But she stood up a little straighter.

Over the next few days, Cress grew and grew. Her stem thickened. More leaves appeared. Her root spread deep and wide. She was a little shorter than Bosworth, and her stem still had that funny curve at the bottom from where she'd had to turn herself around. But she was strong and green and absolutely alive.

One afternoon, a spider named Marguerite crawled across the windowsill and stopped between the two pots.

"You're a funny-looking sprout," Marguerite said to Cress, examining the curved stem. "What happened to you?"

"I was planted upside down," said Cress.

"Upside down!" Marguerite exclaimed. "How did you know which way to grow?"

Cress thought about the tiny heavy things inside her, settling like sand, telling her where down was. She thought about the pull of the sun above, warm and patient, telling her where up was. She thought about the long, hard, confusing work of turning herself around in the dark, all alone in the dirt, with no eyes and no map and nobody to show her the way.

"I just kept feeling for it," Cress said, "until I found it."

Marguerite blinked all eight of her eyes. "Good grief," she said. "That's quite something for a plant with no brain."

"I know," said Cress cheerfully. "Imagine what I could do WITH one."

Bosworth laughed so hard his leaves shook.

And Cress — curvy, determined, upside-down-but-not-anymore Cress — leaned toward the window and soaked up the sun, every last golden drop of it, feeling warm and certain and exactly the right way up.