how plants trick water

Fig 1. Water engaging in Self-Love

A drop of water doesn't actually hate cabbage, it just loves itself. It loves itself so much it squeezes itself into a ball and gleefully zips off to find other things it loves.

Water is a mob of liquid magnets. The individuals have a front and a back, they all prefer the same position with their water mates and they like each other a lot. They like to have parties and a quintillion of them can squeeze into a tight ball.

Water is plant blood, but plants don't have pumps.

Surfaces with magnetic texture are a sprawling palace for the water. Surfaces like glass but not wax. A water molecule cannot resist an endless hall of polar easy chairs on one of these surfaces, and will pull the entire neighborhood over to join it.

Inside of a plant is a long narrow corridor of easy chairs. But the plant can only pull in a water party to a certain height before gravity says "Not in my neighborhood buddy, your meniscus stops here!"

Gravity takes control at about the 1 meter level but the plant knows another trick. It can grow taller.

Fig 2. A closer look at tricky tubes

Once the water encounters gravity it stops. But where it stops is a medieval hotbox chamber for water. The evil leaf tortures the molecules with sunlight and they vent their frustration on one another. When one gets angry enough it'll totally loose it and fly off the handle. It'll just get sick of the water party and flee to join the careless life of a gas.

Here's where the real trick is: To exit the plant the water molecules have to fly through non-polar stuff like Nitrogen. Its like a lubricant in their magnetic world. As angry as they are they realize they still love each other very much and really couldn't care less about this Nitrogen crap. The vaporized molecules form a sort of magnetic convection current, vacuuming the pool up behind them. As the water subjugation machine grows it forces ever greater columns of water molocules to climb the ladder to heaven only to be immolated, cast from the canopy into the wind and removed from their loving kindred.

Victims of the clever plant the water molecules take a long one way journey. Their afterlife is a complete mystery to me.