When I was invited by the Middlebury Public Library to lead a discussion of the book, The Hidden Lives of Trees, by Peter Wholleben, I began by asking everyone attending to introduce us to a tree they loved. That’s a kooky question, but understanding that every tree is an individual is a first step toward valuing them all. And, kooky or not, every person in the wide conversation circle had a story — about a friendly, low-branching climbing tree in the yard of a home long-since leveled for a highway; a pink-flowering dogwood, alongside a grandmother’s porch with its sweetly squeaking metal glider; a sour cherry tree that foamed with soft blossoms in the spring and provided sticky jeweled pies all summer. Those early emotional relationships with a a particular bit of nature can foster lifelong compassion for our richly diverse planet.
Maybe you have a different gateway plant. Was it picking the floofiest poof of a dandelion bloom to rub under the chin of an unwitting friend — that first-grade pseudo-science to determine whether or not someone loves butter? (Actually — that science checks out: It turns out that everyone really does love butter.) Or maybe you learned to select a perfectly wide blade of grass to squeeze between your curving thumbs to blow a buzzing squeak … thereby noticing that every blade is unique, if you only pay attention.
It’s no accident that so many writers are gardeners, since paying attention to the texture of our living world is the heart of each enterprise. This gardening season, I recommend reading Jamaica Kincaid’s deliciously varied anthology of essays titled My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants they Love. Wandering through each writer’s memories is an invitation to dream and plot. Michael Pollan surprises us with an ode to the fast-growing and toxic castor bean: ‘like a party guest with an outsize personality.” Elaine Scarry celebrates columbines, the state flower of Colorado, sparking my own early memories of finding them, sprinkled like shooting stars, alongside Rocky Mountain trails: “The petals are cornsilk, the spray of stamens the color of buttercups, and tawny spurs kick out behind.”
Hoping to help my college students cultivate similar vegetal relationships, in Spring 2020, I asked everyone in a sustainability class to choose one campus tree to get to know as an individual between January and May. I handed out journals and each week they spent ten minutes outside writing about their observations (yes, in the snow, and yes, some students thought I was bonkers). With tips from campus botanists, I asked students to write in detail about the bark and the buds, and taught them how to measure the height of their tree from a distance using only a ruler, a friend, and simple multiplication (you can look it up). But just as they were really getting to know their trees, Covid 19, shockingly, forced us off campus. Students had to begin again, getting to know a tree outside their student apartments or back at their childhood homes. In our twice-weekly Zoom classes, students gave updates on their trees. It was extraordinarily moving to hear their stories — a blue spruce decorated with holiday twinkle lights by the family for fifty years; a weeping willow planted in honor of a brother who died serving in Afghanistan; a crab apple that offered childish ammunition for neighborhood skirmishes. Stories of vulnerability and tenderness bubbled up, enabled by those trees.
What can we learn from plants? Well, what can’t we learn? How to adapt, how to live cooperatively with others, and the costs of neglecting that essential life practice. We learn that our environment is precarious. We learn the marvelous diversity within any species. I think of my friend, Ellyn Stecker, who became a family doctor, and credits her appreciation of the enormous variety of the human experience to weeding the family garden as a child. She noticed, even as a very young person, that within any variety of vegetable, each organism was unique, and she carried that insight into her decades of compassionate medical practice.
In the spirit of celebrating beautiful diversity June, the month of Pride, I’ll let you in on the secret of my latest favorite plant: The Indiana woodland native, Jack in the Pulpit, which I’ve patiently cultivated in the dappled shade of our backyard. It turns out, a Jack can mature into a Jill! As a botanist says of this remarkable species: “An individual plant can display as male or female in any given year and will ‘choose’ which, depending upon the nutrients available in its corm.” After the massive energy of reproduction as a Jill, they usually need some recovery time, and convert back to being a Jack. (I’ll let you decide how much to anthropomorphize that science!)
In this fertile season, we all can cultivate the attention required to build a deep relationship with a plant. If we do, we’ll be amazed by what we learn about our planet, and ourselves.
