One of our interns interviewed me this week for a project she's doing. She is creating a collection of interviews with people as they relate to plants. From people who farm to people who grow only one plant, she wants to understand the connections. Here are my responses for what they're worth:
1. What is your favorite plant, and why? I identify with sunflowers and kale. Sunflowers because they tenaciously come back on their own each year and all I do is move them to a place they can flourish. Kale because it grows almost year round, you can eat all of it, it tastes awesome, is nutritious, and is beautiful. I don’t really have favorites just as I don’t have a favorite color. I only enjoy the interplay of things, not one lone specimen.
2. What first got you interested in plants? Do you remember your first plant, or your first garden? I was born intrigued by the natural world. Plants sit still longer and you can ‘paint’ with them too.
3. What’s kept you growing plants? It’s my way of playing and discovering and painting in a garden I didn’t create and don’t own – which leaves endless mystery and I can do that alone or with as few or as many other fellow travelers as I like. I have a life-long passion to sit in awe of things that are supremely beyond me. Kepler said, his discovery of the natural world was, “Thinking God’s thoughts after Him”, and that’s what keeps me growing plants. The person who designed all this doesn’t just dump all this information on me. He invites me in with beauty to see his mind and heart through his creation. And I never get to the end of his knowledge. I’d like to be that kind of gardener.
4. Have things changed in your life because of plants? I’ve had two amazing jobs that involved the nurture of plants and plants have also helped me understand spiritual and relational truths.
5. Now for a harder one: could you give three words that describe why you grow plants? humbling, mysterious, joyful
6. What does community have to do with growing plants? People bond by working together, by sharing a need, by ritual by being in awe at the same phenomenon. Growing food involves all that and more. I think we are all naked in the garden – stripped of our artificial importance. That makes us very uncomfortable or very comforted. We are all in the same boat – in need of food plants and in awe of beauty. Eating food plants is a profound act of taking something into ourselves and when we do that together and for each other, it is very intimate and powerful.
7. What’s the best advice someone ever gave you about growing plants? Wendell Berry’s saying we needed to be wed to place. I grew up in a disposable culture. Staying put no matter what and intimately knowing a place is a mirror for how we are to be with people.
8. Have you ever had an actual favorite plant? Or a plant with a great story? I don’t’ recall.
9. Tell me a plant fact. Or a plant joke, if you’ve got a good one. Not a fact or a joke but think about plants – They are literally balls of sunlight can you play with, be in awe over, paint with, eat and share.
10. Do you think people can have a connection with plants, and that that connection changes growing them? If you love something you want it to be healthy and flourish. Now love for me is very different for people than for plants and yet it’s one and the same.. I believe our view of love affects everything we do, including growing plants. If we love selfishly we either pamper the object or want it to be perfect. Sometimes the most loving thing I can do for a plant (or a person) is to withhold my intervention or intervene in a way that seems harsh. If I have a wrong view of love then I won’t be a good gardener, lover, parent, or friend.
