Summary

In “Part Three: Flowers and Fruit,” Chapter 1, Jahren explains that the oceans were populated some sixty million years before there was significant life on land. Then life flourished until urbanization cut into green space. Jahren saw a huge difference in the green of the south and the sprawl of Baltimore. In some ways, she hated leaving Georgia but said she and Bill had matured during their time there and needed a place to “spread out” (172). They decided Baltimore could be it.

In Chapter 2, Bill and Jahren had a chance encounter with a professor who was a colleague of Jahren's dissertation advisor, which prompted her to call this professor Uncle Ed. Ed had been involved in a project that evolved into the theory that it was possible to tell the history of global ice by studying fossil shells. Ed...