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Bella Peacock is a writer and PhD student at Murdoch University.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, on the teachings of plants and Potawatomi traditions has been seminal for this short essay.
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FUND ISSUE 2
On Plants
Bella Peacock
Bella Peacock
Last week, I came downstairs to find holes in my garden where plants had been. Overnight someone had dug up three corn, four lettuces, a chilli, a sage flower and disentangled a long tomato vine from its trellis, leaving behind an arm covered in green fruit. What a strange mission: to come in the night, armed with spades, secateurs and boxes, to take mature but unripe vegetables, when seedlings are abundant in spring, and cost a few dollars at most.
The Potawatomi, an Indigenous culture from North America’s Great Lakes region, consider humans the Earth’s youngest brother, among its newest arrivals. Like anything in its youth, our species is schooled by its elders, by the trees and animals, the ocean and the mountains.
These speak not with words, but by what they do, what they offer. For Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, plants have particularly special teaching – that of generosity. Consider, for instance, the artistry in how flowering plants reproduce. Without legs with which to find a mate, these beings grow bright, fragrant flowers, inviting insects and birds to land on their delicate pads. Inside the flower is an offering, sweet nectar. As the insects eat, pollen catches – in fact is magnetised – to their hairy legs. Then they fly on, carrying the plant’s reproductive system with them. And when a future flower somehow senses the pollen of its counterpart, he attaches it in place, growing from it a seed. That seed slowly encases itself in a peach, a cherry, a tomato, some tasty morsel to feed an animal so that it has energy to eventually deposit the plant’s offspring housed in a bed of fertiliser.
Western science largely frames the ‘natural world’ as indifferent and mechanistic. But this doesn’t seem like a system of indifference to me, nor to Kimmerer. I don’t know if plants like being rooted in place, that’s unanswerable. But whether this limitation is welcome or not, their response is tender and creative. These plants harness help from their fellow beings by fashioning beauty, they offer their thanks in the form of food. To put it differently, plants nourish others as a survival strategy.
I’ve been ruminating on the lessons of plants – on the grace of their responses – less because of my garden thief and more because, as a climate and energy writer, it’s becoming clear there is no path in which our future looks like our present. I doubt the changes will be at our behest, or that they will be easy and welcome. Just as with my garden thief, there are countless ways to respond to this, but our mechanisms for control are few.
Over the years, I’ve protested, pushed policies, and published hundreds of articles. These have impacted little. But in September, I stepped into a space where, for the first time, I could see actual effects. There, in this intensive permaculture design course, I saw patches where both humans and land were thriving, even as signs of collapse spread in surrounding forests and towns. How much brighter might the world be if, when faced with this existential hurdle, we responded by providing nourishment to the world around us as the fruit trees do?
Permaculture is largely seen as a gardening practice, which it is, but the gardens are really just a visible aspect. At its heart, it’s a philosophy about spending time beyond the human world, about valuing and tending to the plethora of life forms that have enabled our own. Like the Potawatomi people, Indigenous Australians, and countless others, permaculture recognises that we are but one part of a vast web of intelligences. From the weeds to the apex predators, every being has purpose, whether we understand its role or not.
To put it in the broadest strokes, humans and animals balance ecosystems, plants originate. These autotrophs hold the power to animate from the inanimate, “gathering the energy of the world and passing it along,” as Kimmerer says. In some Indigenous languages, the term for plant translates to “those who take care of us.” Humans don’t make the cherries, we only help set the conditions for fruit.
In Western Australia it might be labelled alarmist, but what we’ll eat 30 years from now is a very real question. For me, my front garden is a way to practice sustaining the life that sustains me. It’s also a way of building relationships with those around me, bonds we’ll need in the years to come.
In a way, the theft did forge a relationship. That person, or people, will pass by our garden differently now. Perhaps my thief has another lesson too: that it’s unrealistic to expect I’ll always be able to dictate my terms of sharing. Everything beyond my skin isn’t really mine. It’s a gift, and can disappear.
I don’t know if my thief was driven by desperation or entitlement or kleptomania, or if they’ll come again. But they did open up space in my crowded beds, and new plants are growing there now.
I do hope they transplanted the tomatoes and corn carefully though, that they took enough soil to preserve the roots. Mostly, I hope they pay attention to those plants – close enough to hear what they’re saying.