From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

The morning glory unravels her colorful petals at dawn, inviting her face to receive the life-giving nourishment of sunlight. At nightfall, she twists her petals, fashioning a protected envelope ensuring a soft slumber. 

Deep into the rapture of the season’s blooms, Liam Kelly finds morning glories curled around wooden posts and native plants, strewn about his new neighborhood in Jamaica Plain.

He collects their seeds and spreads them around wherever he goes: dark South Boston alleyways, Egleston square front yards, shady woodland areas. The following summer, he notices the myriad of morning glories sprouting up in the places he had scattered them.

He and his friends in Brooklyn, NY start to swap varieties of morning glories and plant each other’s in and around their homes. The erupting glories tie him to this moment of change, to places where he explores and struggles with the growing pains of self-expansion.

The recognition of those flowers around town, the burst of life that comes from just one seed, is not only a memory, but a lesson to be learned. 

It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a “species loneliness” – estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

I’ve noticed that many of my own conversations about “nature” often make me feel even more separate from nature. It’s funny given that nature, however we cut it, is inseparable from being a human on Earth.

And yet for many of us, nature remains a foreign and “outdoor” concept: a jungle, a coral reef, a rocky trek, a blue-skied view. “Nature” evokes guilt – our inevitable and hopeless participation in pervasive systems and economies that run on maniacally consuming the world’s resources. 

But it also feels true- we are separate, in a way. Nature can be terrifying and deadly to us. Nature is unpredictable, unfathomable, uncontrollable. 

I have felt ashamed deep down to realize that no matter how much I love hiking and seem to love birches, I am afraid of being in the woods alone come sundown. Deep down, I feel that nature and humanity are incompatible, an abusive pairing that I am unable to reform.

The fear comes from a human place of needing to stay away from danger in order to survive. Fear also comes from dodging the unknown, the not-yet-understood. It is the immense gap in knowledge and relationship with the powerful world beyond (and within) human invention that many of us struggle to welcome. 

We can’t talk about nature in this century without “climate change” blaring in our minds; most observations and discussions about nature centralize on the existential threat and uncertainty of our future. Many people are asking: how do we repair the world? 

I’m asking us to consider another question today: How do we repair our relationship (little by little) to the home that gives us life? Maybe the only way is through the weeds.

I drop to my knees in the grass and I can hear the sadness, as if the land itself was crying for its people: Come home. Come home.

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

How do we gaze at the beings that share this sky and earth, the ones that toss acorns on the sidewalk, the ones that pile up and decay in our gutters?

It’s hard to perceive plants as memories, as capsules of 700 million years of evolutionary wisdom. But they, like us, experience migrations, invasions, vibrant communities, hopeful births, and lonesome deaths.

In my experience, storytelling is the best bridge for understanding. In this post, we meet Liam, who picks me up on Commonwealth Ave in a big green landscaping truck on a sweltering day in June and leads me through his memory of  the deep stories of plants in Larz Anderson Park.

Can you imagine, for example, what trees do…whenever we’re not looking?

Mary Oliver

When I met Liam the first time last year, we quickly fell into a conversation about seeds. He invited me to the community gardens he tends to in Somerville, introducing by name tens of varieties of basil, all from different places, all associated with different memories and people.

Every seedling had a story, every plant a memory, spanning continents and centuries. This was the first time I realized the depth of stories and life that is constantly murmuring around us. Once the veil is lifted ever so slightly, a torrent of wonder and meaning rolls in.

To top it off, he gifted me a white jasmine flower that swelled my room with her sweet aroma for a week. 

Sprouting up in a rural part of New England, little Liam hopped from interest to interest: volcanoes, gemstones, airplanes, military history, flowers. When people asked him, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” his answer was always “a farmer”.

At a tender age, Liam recalls his father often tending to a vegetable garden by their home.

“I remember being in that garden and feeling a connection with him,” he reflects. 

In these first experiences with gardening, Liam started paying attention to how plants live- what they do, what they need, how they grow, and how it relates to him.

His first exploration was touching a Serrano chili pepper, then touching his face and balling his eyes out. He spent much of his time immersed in the woodlands, noticing trees, “seeing things happen”. He reflects, 

“At some point, there came a threshold where I was aware of so many things happening in plants – it continues to blow my mind. They started raising more questions, which was groundbreaking for me – being asked a question back by something I am observing. It clicked – this is a being that I am communicating with and having a relationship with.”

When Liam stumbled upon the story of chestnut trees in New England, he had a “visceral feeling of connection”. He told me this story while smiling affectionately at a tall chestnut in Larz Anderson Park: 

“It was one of the first instances where I was made aware of the massive changes that have happened in our ecosystems over the past couple centuries. There’s this tree that is a behemoth, that rivals the Redwoods but lives on the east coast making nuts- the sweetest chestnuts out there. There were an estimated 4 billion trees growing between Maine and Georgia. But then, within a couple of decades, they were all gone from this blight fungus. This was so catastrophic. So much life depended on them. But they are still around. I remember being so taken with that story – fortunately they grow everywhere where I grew up. What’s cool about these trees is that even when the huge trunks die, the root collar stays alive indefinitely. Today, you walk around and see chestnut trees in the woods – a lot of times they are growing in a rough circular shape and you can see the diameter of the old trunk. On the soccer field where my little sibling played, the field had a bunch of chestnut trees growing around it and for some reason, I’m not sure, maybe just luck, the trees there got big enough to flower often. There was one summer that I went around and pollinated the flowers to try to see if I could grow some and redistribute them. I was reading obsessively about how to propagate these trees, how to graft them, how to pollinate them. I got to eat a couple chestnuts. It was like carroty-sweet, like carrot cake. I finally got some American chestnut seedlings – and then my cat Monty ate them. Every single one.” 

Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Thinking of plants as living creatures with histories and families is one way to feel connection. Another dimension involves recognizing how humans and plants have been intertwined for centuries.

Our journey as humans depends on plants for food, medicine, and protection. The plants we have ‘tamed’ have shaken hands with us too. Liam uses the evolution of crop plants as an example: 

“Something that I learned about wheat versus the wild grasses: once their seeds are ripe, they need to disperse them. The wild ones usually just fall right off the plant. But wheat holds on to the seeds because they can’t be dropping on the ground when we’re trying to harvest it. If wheat was growing like that in nature, it would have a really tough time. It wouldn’t be able to disperse itself – it’s fitness would be poor. But people cultivate it. That’s not just a coincidence that that is the case. It’s trust. It’s completely two way, too. It’s not just that we are taking advantage of that plant when we eat it.”

Digging deeper into the inner lives of plants, Liam explains what we can learn from plants not only about trust and evolution, but what trust they have in their own families and homes.

Discussing the harsh realities of American capitalism, Liam brought the conversation back to asking questions about what it means to exist in a system:  

“The individual is important to the masses. There are trees that fuse their roots together and add nutrients to one another so that when one is disadvantaged and another is thriving- it’s like social welfare. Looking at the questions that are asked of me: looking at how a tree lives, how they see the world and think and understanding things. Invariably there are lessons I can learn. There are a lot of lessons based on equity and reciprocity.”

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

As a gardener, Liam is often tending to plants both indoors and outdoors. The indoor plants require constant attention, watering by hand and repotting. He reflects that the practice of paying attention to something and caring for it is a lesson that can be transposed to other places.

To aid a plant in its growth, you need to have a relationship with it – to watch for how much sunlight and water it needs, when it flowers, how it bends, what insects and animals flock to it.

He loves to grow plants for other people and gift them. He loves when he receives a plant as a gift. “Transfer and capacity, a plant holds more and more,” he says. 

I buzz with life’s questions, questions that perhaps the plants have mastered in their evolution.

How do we reanimate what is lost or broken?

How do we help each other grow?

How do we as individuals persist?

How do we practice patience?

What is the root of devotion and trust?

What does it mean to belong? 

Walking through Franklin Park, we came across a few little Oak saplings. Liam gingerly touches their fresh leaves and muses, 

“These have a long way to go before they become the big Oaks they hope to be. Maybe they’ll still be young long after I’m gone. They teach me patience.”

A mammoth-sized Thank You to Liam Kelly for taking long walks and sharing his passions with us, and for re-introducing me to Mary Oliver, the poet who is known to wander and be inspired by the deep woods. Thank you so much to Jason Kimball for letting me read your copy of “The Overstory” by Richard Powers, which has also shifted the way I connect with plants (highly recommend!). “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer was also super influential as inspiration for this post. Please share any thoughts, stories, and questions you may have (about the universe). Love you all ❤