This week I started reading, The Lost Language of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner. My approach to this book has been non-linear, picking and choosing the parts that catch my eye. I often read in this way — even novels, which are generally meant to be read from front to back. Eventually, I do often return to a book and read it “the right way,” but that can be after several non-linear pass throughs. This is one reason why I have little interest in writing reviews. All of that forced linear reading is not for me!

But I digress. I say all of this upfront to make it known that this post is not meant as a book review by any stretch. There are huge portions of the book that I have not yet read and I don’t feel confident that I can — at least at this point — put together a clear picture of what to expect from the book as a whole. Instead, I want to use some of the stories and portions that I have read as a jumping off point for thoughts that have been floating around in my head.

In the second chapter, entitled, The Two Wounds, the author writes about his first trip to New York City to give a talk on the topic of Sacred Plant Medicine. Three women show up for the class and each are invited to share why the travelled across town to be there. The first woman explains that recently she hadn’t, “…wanted to live.” She had begun having dreams in which her grandmother came to her and told her that she needs to get her hands into the dirt. Eventually, she finds out about a community garden and decides to join. And when she gets there and puts her hands into the soil she feels that she knows who she is again. She decided to go to the talk because the profound impact of the experience had left her thinking that maybe she is crazy.

Recently, before I started reading the book, I did 3 interviews with various media outlets, and each one asked me how I got started gardening. This is an often asked question and one that has always been tricky for me to answer because I do not have a quick and simple sound bite to give. Growing plants was something that I pursued in starts and stops, never understanding what it was or why I did it. As a result, I have multiple Genesis stories, but for some reason the one I keep telling recently is about something that happened in the summer that I turned 17.

I have mentioned before that I grew up in a townhouse complex. However, in my late teens the family moved into a bungalow with a “proper” backyard. Things had always been tense within the home, but there seemed to be a pressure around the move that only served to amplify my parents’ pathologies and family disfunction. It was a very difficult and frightening time. Desperate and fearful for my life, I ran away twice. With nowhere to go and without the means to live on my own, I always went back, until later that winter when I left for good (Well, goodish. There is more to this story, but it’s not for today). One day that summer I went out into the backyard and started digging what one would describe as a garden. I chose a shady spot behind the garage where the grass was spotty, my rationale being that no one would mind if I dug there. Of course it was the worst place to try and grow a garden and I suppose that would have been a factor had I had any plants, seeds, the knowledge with which to grow them, or even the consciousness to know what it was that I was trying to do. All of this was done without any intellectual thought behind it. It was an impulse, something inside me that I couldn’t put into clear thoughts or words. I needed a garden, but what’s odd is that neither the word itself nor a vision of it ever entered my mind.

The couple next door had a garden. Although I could barely catch a glimpse of it through their Fort Knox-style fence, I knew that they spent a lot of time in it. The only portion of their efforts I could see were a handful of meticulously trimmed round topiaries out front. Their hyper-perfection repulsed me. There were no gardens in the townhouse complex where I had grown up. There were lawns and there were small, immature trees that came under attack every Devil’s Night by some gang of neighbourhood delinquents, of which we had more than our fair share. Sometimes there were those red lollipop-head geraniums with an unpleasant smell, a lazy smattering of begonias that dried up from neglect, or a lone marigold planted without feeling or creativity. There, in my hometown, ironically dubbed The Garden City, I didn’t really know what a garden was because my only examples were limp and emotionless, half-heartedly planted more out of obligation than passion or joy. To be fair, I’m sure there are plenty of inspiring gardens in that city. It’s just that I didn’t see or experience them. So when I went back behind the garage to dig a garden that summer day, I had no frame of reference to draw upon. The word “garden” didn’t enter my mind because I didn’t know what a garden was or could be. All I had was an inexplicable and powerful drive to connect with the world and (had I been able to go further with it) myself.

But I didn’t know that then. It took several more inexplicable and unarticulated starts and stops before I came to a point where I stopped stopping, years more before I understood that I was a gardener, and even more time still before I understood why I was doing it.

These days, I am often surrounded by plants, talking about plants, or writing about them. I never really stop gardening and there is always plenty, if not too much greenery around for me to nurture during the winter months. Yet every spring something in me wakes up along with the soil and the plants outside. No matter how connected I feel to a sense of self, the self that I feel when I am in the garden touching the soil, tending my plants, sowing seeds, following a bee, and just being there is a much more powerful and whole self that I am not yet fully able to carry with me into other aspects of life. It is in my garden — wherever it may be — that I am most myself. Without language or even conscious thought I am able to know intuitively exactly who I am.

Thinking on this further I am reminded of an incident a few years back. I had travelled to New York to attend a conference, and I don’t know if it was because I had been to too many similar hyper-social professional events that year or if it was that conference specifically, but I was having an exceptionally lousy time. With each presentation I sat in on I felt myself sinking into a growing sense of disconnect and alienation from everything that was going on around me and eventually I started to feel there was something wrong with me because I had spent a lot of money to be there and yet here I was unable to jibe with it or the other people attending. I had not felt that profoundly alone since I was a kid. I had to get out of there. Fortunately, the conference was only a block away from The High Line, an elevated public park and garden built on a disused portion of the New York City Central Railroad. I walked out of the building and headed straight for the garden. Here was a very busy and public urban park — busier and better attended than the conference I had just left. And yet the second I walked into that space and looked around at all of the plants, I felt like myself again. I felt alive and connected with the world. The sense of alienation and aloneness I had felt lifted immediately and I remember thinking, “This is who I am.” I suppose that the lesson here is that it really doesn’t have to be my own garden or any garden for that matter. It’s the plants themselves that are healing.

There are plenty of other examples like the one shared by the New Yorker in The Lost Language of Plants, some that demonstrate an experience some people have of being able to communicate with plants or feeling that certain plants are communicating with them. These ideas are a little more difficult for me to comprehend as they challenge a sense of logic and reason that… yeah, I’m at a loss for words here. On the one hand, I am not so arrogant to think that I know exactly how the world works. My attitude is that there is much out there that is beyond my comprehension and always will be. Yet, if there is one word in the english language that makes me shudder other than “panties” it has to be “spirituality.” There is a lot in this book about the sacred and the spiritual that I’m willing to open my mind to, but if I’m being honest has also had me rolling my eyes just a little bit. [Further aside: I thought a lot about this as I was out in the garden tending my climbing roses and came back here to add something further. There is certainly something primal that occurs when I am around plants and there is an intuitiveness that I have around growing them that has been supported over the years by real experience and knowledge. What happens there is a communication of sorts, but as of now, I do not interpret these experiences as the plants literally talking to me. Who knows? Maybe a linear read through the book will alter my perspective or perhaps something will shift some day and I will come to see this in a new way. Regardless of my perspective now, I haven’t completely disregarded the idea outright. It’s thought provoking.]

However, the message that we modern humans share an affliction of profound disconnect with the natural world is what has resonated with me most about the book so far. This is where my heart is now when it comes to writing about gardening. The knowledge in how to garden carries importance because it gives rise to the confidence to start and to keep doing it. However, as I mature, what I experience and feel as a gardener are what I most want and need to express. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that there are a lot of us who carry a deep need to grow things. We crave this connection to the soil that is sometimes difficult to understand or articulate. The intensity of this need and the power behind it when we do get our hands into the soil can make us feel as if we are a bit crazy. It helps to know that there are others like us who share this innate need, and in a world where there is so much inhumanity and so many horrors perpetrated as a result of this profound disconnect with our humanness, there is quite possibly a greater value in telling honest stories and putting words to an act that carries within it the potential to change our relationship to ourselves and the world around us.

Too dramatic?