There are two kinds of people: those who keep plants alive and those who do not. I am somewhere in between. I by no means possess a green thumb. I keep the plants in my apartment alive. I care about them and feel connected to their presence, but I have never repotted them in a timely fashion or played music specifically for them. I have never grown from seed, or had a city garden on my fire escape. I once tended to marigolds and basil and lemon balm on a small balcony of a third-floor apartment I lived in upstate, but I let them die in the sun while I was away on a trip. Still, plants speak to me. I don’t know why they believe in me, or how they know I will hear them, but they do speak to me. Speak is a rather strong word. Maybe what they do is emanate.
I love people who love plants, people who know about aerial roots and can differentiate between medicine and poison, plant people. My imagined, idealized, evolved self is a plant person. Who is this fantasy person? Some contemporary mash-up of Jamaica Kincaid and Virginia Woolf, equal parts literary genius, plant cultivator, keeper, and sharer of corporeal, spiritual and intellectual knowledge. Both Woolf and Kincaid were devoted to their own gardens and wrote extensively on their connection between their writing craft and their gardening. In an interview, Kincaid once said, “When I’m writing, I think about the garden, and when I’m in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.” It is equally easy for me to fantasize about being a writer as it is to fantasize about being a plant person. These fantasies of lifestyle and values echo each other. It is romantic until you must edit. It is romantic until you must weed.
It was from this fantasy and calling that I launched myself into a plant-oriented community. I connected with gardener Naneh Israelyan who runs the rooftop garden atop Honey’s, the meadery in Bushwick. Naneh cultivates the rooftop garden plots differently each year, although her guiding force is herbal and medicinal plants. She took me on to help with the unglamorous, yet wholly rewarding practice of herbal gardening and medicine making. Together through the spring, summer, and fall, we planted, weeded, washed roots, and dried material.
Naneh introduced me to other herbalists with their own nuanced and reverent relationships to the land they cultivate and the medicine they procure, including Jess Turner of Olamina Botanicals. Last November, my other writer friend and I traveled upstate to help Jess with the season’s last harvest. I felt peace in my body and mind sitting on the earth, a few rows away from my friend, as we collected calendula and horehound. I had a simple, yet intimate task. All that was required of me was my attention and patience.
Many writers have found deep solace in gardening. There is something romantic and yet equally insufferable about the required dedication involved with writing and gardening. If one wants to be a gardener or a writer, one must surrender. Surrender to the elements, surrender to time, surrender one’s ego, surrender to the path.
As a writer, I live a lot in my head. It is easy to forget about my body when I write. There is concrete, collaborative work to be done in a garden or on a farm. This explicit labor provides a relief rarely found in the foggier processes of revision and idea extrapolation. The same hands that type out my ideas are the same hands that dig around in the dirt, the same hands that harvest and process the herbs and plants.
As entangled as I am in my intangible, theoretical, fantasy-oriented writer-mind, the corporeal reality of gardening brings me back to earth. And because it is the same me gardening and writing, they are entangled in each other. When I cannot think anymore, I need to put my hands in dirt. And the plants always give some alchemical inspiration that leads me back to the page. Like a balance scale, when I find myself lost in either world too much, the other is waiting for me to engage.