# Corn and Beans In this reflection, Matthew Battles, editor of *Arnoldia Magazine*, offers a lyric meditation on two plants that shaped his childhood, the landscape he calls home, and his thought: corn and beans. August 04, 2025 By: Matthew Battles / Edited by: Russell Powell Corn and beans, corn and beans, the refrain of childhood summer drives into the country, up out of the folded town, up and out of the river valley, up into an Illinois dizzy with its endless contours, its rows and serried shadows, corn and beans, corn and beans. The polyrhythm of the country road: the beans laying themselves open to sky and scrutiny, murmuring their fruit in furred and greening pods; cornrows combing by, the vast rhomboid fields slowly revolving; distant treelines drifting, yawing toward you, now filling the forward scene, swallowing the road ahead; dipping and craning toward the looming timber, taking a curve or two down to a low bridge, a bright seam of creek amid silver-maple leaves flashing their pubescence; another curve and a quick climb back up into the ambient, into the corrugation, corn and beans, corn and beans, as the next treeline watercourse shifts and compasses on the horizon. ![a photo of a field of corn and beans](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2025-08/IMG_0940_reduced.jpg?itok=e-einKfv) Credit: Photo by Noah CosgriffCorn and beans, corn and beans, inescapable, uniform, vast, the green weight of ubiquity, the vegetal embodiment of extraction. From the roadside, the corn swallows distance, refuses the horizon, walls the way with its darkening corridors, winking with the syncopation of foreshortening and foliage. The dusky gathering of shadows around the tiny umbrellas of buttressing rootlets rayed out at the bases of the stalks, suggesting a vast shadow-castle of secrets. A treasury of labyrinths, hiding secret whorls of pattern and fracture out there in the endless x and y. And every several hundred meters, a white sign on a pole of perforated steel, naming the strains, the trademarked genes, the branded lineages of the sisters. What is it now to recollect those seething seas of foliage lapping at the edges of town, feeding on the luminous sky? To feel now the weight of that vast rustle, the mapping of the winds that flash as quick waves across the green corrugation? *Zea mays* and *Glycine max*, ancient lineages of domestication, two of the sisters of the Green Revolution colonized into crops to colonize the silt-loam and loess. Drive long enough, and the fragrance of the plowed fields, the smell of growth and the grave, gives way to the smell of the Staley and ADM plants coaxing forth these sisters’ spirits—the rich, sour stink of the sulfur dioxide in which the kernels steep and steep, sifted and milled, washed and centrifuged, fracturing into their constituents, rising to the skim. From mound and temple-time to the era of grain elevators and smokestacks, the spirits rise—fermentation and nixtamalization, *atsuage* and *aburaage*, whiskey and vodka, *chicha* and *cheonggukjang*, fabric and fodder, germ, fiber, starch, and gluten, oils and textured proteins, long-chain polymers and simple carbohydrates, alcohols and esters, lecithin and lysine, tryptophan and tyrosine, aspartic and glutamic acids. As my friends and I came into ecological awareness, it dawned on us that we didn’t live in the “country,” but on a vast factory floor, a landscape whose soil was deemed too rich for growing mere food. To work in those summers detasseling or cutting corn out of beans, to push through the press and tickle of endless foliage, dripping with sweat and the cloistered moisture of the endless rows, was to realize the way these crops made the landscape impassable. Only the massive tractors called combines could navigate these distances, churning the crop into feed and fodder, their overhanging glassy cabs and plated surfaces like the hulls of the towboats that churn the big rivers pushing barges piled golden and white with the combines’ harvest. Lights of combines moving planetary out in the big dark of the night fields, measuring the horizons, their engine groans swallowed by sheer distance. At the county fair, we’d climb up onto the combines the implement companies put on display, watch the lights of Ferris wheel and Tilt-a-Whirl spin on the midway, listen to the monster trucks and demolition-derby cars ply the dirt track beyond the grandstand. We’d loll, swing legs, toss down nibbled-edged corndog sticks at the girls going by, while Orion rose over the dark fields stretching out everywhere from the edge of the fairgrounds to the dissolving horizon. Corn and beans, corn and beans, thickening toward harvest. Switchgrass settles, dropseed drowses, and bluestem bides its time; new corn rises to the reaper and shatters into fodder, and new bean fields swell to green. These fields that strobe the seasons, corn and beans, between the river and the hills above the highway. In spring, water comes scouring through the smooth knees of maples, corn stubble staking out the flood's dull shine. Deer cross the road to gain the hills, some bloodied and broken on the busy road unrolling—blacktop shading white, perspective’s trick, a single skein of pavement to comprehend a continent. What I know comes through the corn like this: trickling, mirroring, torrential, insubstantial, clear as water, and as incompressible, an inland sea that claims to be invisible. --- ![Matthew Battles headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-08/IMG_9632.jpeg?itok=MOP5v9Kk) Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. The author of six books, his writing has appeared in such venues as *The American Scholar*, *The Atlantic*, *Harper’s Magazine*, and *The New York Times*. His most recent book, *TREE*, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. For Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, he edits *Arnoldia*, a magazine exploring the urgency of tree-entangled science, history, and storytelling for our time, and he lectures in comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. See also:- [ Thinking with Plants and Fungi ](/programming-threads/thinking-plants-and-fungi) - [ TWPF Blog Page ](/programming-threads/twpf-blog-page)