WHEN WE LOOK at our landscapes and gardens, most of us don’t often think about what we’re really looking at.
We’re really looking at conglomerations of cells. Not only the cells that form the plants and animals we see, but also the single-celled prokaryotes and eukaryotes that are everywhere and coat everything, but which are too small for us to observe. We seldom think of them, but they run the world.
Let’s define terms. Prokaryotes are single-celled organisms that lack a nucleus. They are asexual, reproducing by cell division. The first form of life on this planet seems to have been cyanobacteria, a prokaryote. Despite their independent lifestyles, some prokaryotes, including cyanobacteria, huddle together to form large colonies. So, from the get-go, the earliest
