THE MYCO BEFORE CHRISTMAS 'Twas the night before Christmas, and all over the ground
No plants were stirring- there wasn’t a sound;
Their roots spread throughout the soil with care,
In hopes that St. Myco soon would be there;
The rhizomes were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of fungi danced in their heads;
Eileen was chillin’; Dr. Mike had a beer,
Watching a Ducks game, getting ready to cheer,
When down in their yard there arose such a clatter,
They sprang from the couch to see what was the matter.
Off to the window they made a quick dash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the luster of mid-day to the soil below,
When, what to their wondering eyes should they see?
It was jolly St. Myco planting a tree!
He used Liquid Endo, all drippy and wet;
spraying the roots was a pretty good bet.
Then he whistled, and shouted, and called out some names:
"Now, Gigaspora! now, Pisolithus!
On, Suillus! on Laccaria, Rhizopogon and Glomus!!
From deep in the ground they heard his loud call:
“Inoculate! Inoculate! Colonize all!"
As sand in the desert blows in the breeze,
When tossed by a storm through the cacti and trees
Thus into the topsoil the propagules flew,
With a sack full of Endo and Ultrafine too.
And then, in a twinkling, they saw some stuff pour
All Purpose Granular spilled to the floor.
While twisting their heads and turning around,
Suddenly St. Myco just sprang from the ground!
He was covered with hyphae- rather hairy I’d say,
just sucking up phosphorus in a gluttonous way.
A sheath of chiton clung to his back,
So nary a fear of pathogen attack.
His spores were all over – so many and merry!
His arbuscules like roses, his vesicles like cherries!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the mycelia around him were as white as the snow;
A nematode’s body he held tight in a noose,
gripped by a hyphae- it will never get loose;
He had a broad face and a root-ball belly,
That shook when he laughed like glomalin jelly.
He was funky and weird, a right crazy old dude,
And they laughed when they saw him, trying not to be rude;
But a wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave them to know they had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but got on with his work,
colonizing root cells; then he turned with a jerk,
And with hundreds of hyphae all over his bod,
he burst through the soil past the trees and the sod,
Then continued on with a song and a whistle
spreading fungal spores like the down from a thistle.
But they heard him exclaim as he flew into the night
"Happy Christmas to all, and start those roots right!"
From "Our Company Poet-Laureate Larry Simpson" at
www.mycorrhizae.com/