I am writing 100 How-To essays. It is a big project. Here is why I am doing it. This is essay 44 of 100.
I’m going to write something I have written here many times before: I am not really exactly a plant person. I mean, I chose birds. Not that there can only be one thing you pick, but I’m pretty well-rounded, and birds and plants are in roughly the same Appreciating Nature category. In addition to birds, I have picked the following other things to like (respective categories in parentheses).
Comics and cartoons (creative)
First person narrative writing (language)
Pie (desserts)
Bread-baking (overall food)
Veganism (niche causes)
Chickens (outdoor animals)
Rogers Park (neighborhoods)
Whimsical prints (clothing)
Polyamory (Millennial classification)
Teaching (vocation)
But, as I mentioned in my last post, this is a global pandemic. Given this new reality, I think that if you want to take on birds AND plants, you should go for it.
Many intelligent people over the past several weeks have pointed out in conversation that Nature doesn’t seem to care all that much that it is a global pandemic. Nature keeps on doing SPRING, because baby, SPRING is a party that doesn’t need any guests. It’s its own guests. It is going to come whether or not you feel that such a behavior is prudent.
This is a very cool thing. I have noticed it during other hard times, too. (Haven’t you?) All the times that a person in my life has died, the first gentle alleviator of my grief has historically been a thing growing out of the ground. Plants die and come back a little differently every year. They don’t make a big deal out of it. It’s like they’re going, “This is just the cycle of it all. The sooner you let go into this cycle, the sooner you can live your best life.” Which plants absolutely almost all of the time do. (There is the tiniest possibility that it sucks to be a bonsai tree.)
I live in Rogers Park in Chicago, which is my favorite neighborhood of all time on all of earth ever. (See above list.) Chicago in general, though, is serious about winter. Even this winter, which was a mild winter, stripped out all the green like a starkly minimalist interior designer. It wasn’t like that in New Orleans, where I used to live, or in Oregon, where there are more pine trees than flannel shirts. But in all the places I lived, there has been an awakening that happens, in degrees, but nevertheless, in March and April.
That process is really getting underway right now, and let me tell you: I am Here. For. It. Two years ago I started going to a Prayer Porch in the neighborhood — a 6:30 a.m. ritual half hour of poems and prayers and someone to make your coffee for you. The best thing about Prayer Porch in April was that spring came into focus in daily intervals on the walks to and from. One day, the suggestion of an elbow of maybe a green thing. The next day, the elbow would be apparent. The next day something leafy would poke out. And so on and so forth, until every tree and side lot had succumbed, and I got to watch it all in stunning 3D, unfolding like a very slow, predictable, expensive, Tony-award-winning play. (We recently went to see “The Band’s Visit” when it came to Chicago. Like that.)
I have written about plants before, and I’ll write about them again. My aim here is not to moan soggily about how grand spring is, or to act as though I have discovered anything you did not already know. My aim is to suggest that you take on plants as another past-time in these slow and difficult days.
(OK, by the way, I am writing this outside on a kind of hidden old porch swing, and I just overheard a kid go, “Whoever runs to the chickens first gets a FLOWER.” First of all: those are my chickens and it was my life goal to be a landmark in a children’s game. Was, past-tense, because I have now accomplished it. Second: what a good prize! This all feels relevant to what I’m getting at.)
Here are some suggestions:
Learn the names of the plants. Technology has made this a lot easier with a trillion (exact number) free apps that have you snap a picture of a leaf or a flower and then tell you the name of the plant. This is how I learned (well, Luke learned, but I was there) about chocolate tube slime, and I have never been quite the same. In a good way. If this world can create something as otherworldly as chocolate tube slime, then the evidence is good to support the idea that the so-called other world has been in this one all along.
Last year Jill Riddell (hero, guide, friend, mentor, magical creature of her own) told me about scilla, which are blankety blue carpets of flowers the come up on lawns in front of very old and creaky houses. This year she texted me, “Right now we have some front lawns in Hyde Park that are entirely blue. Imagine being that beautiful and productive when you’re 130 years old!!.” And then quickly, “Actually, you probably will be.” GOOD COMPLIMENT, JILL. Scilla is named for the monster-goddess Scylla, which is magical and soul-awakening as a fact on its own.
Being able to say things like, “That’s Scilla,” or even to say the names of things like daffodils or tulips or crocuses, makes the world come alive in new ways. You start to find out what is a weed, too. Right now we are inside a collective moment of feeling quenched by every green thing that pops up. I am literally cherishing the dandelion leaves under my shoes right now. But in two months I’ll be sweating to pull them up and out, so embarrassing will be my riches.
My mom taught me “azalea,” “rhododendron,” “forget-me-not,” and “iris.” I tell my students they have to learn at least one new plant name of something they see outside in order to pass my class. I happen to know you can’t learn just one. There’s a Pokemon gotta-catch-em-all feeling you get when you learn your first plant name.
If it’s a weed (growing out of a lawn where no one seems to want it) and it’s a flower (think smallish and bright and plentiful), take the plant and press it between the pages of wax paper, wedged in between two heavy books. Then, two weeks later, you can put the pressed flowers in the mail sandwiched inside a greeting card to tell someone how much you love them. It will work.
This works, too, with flowers you plant yourself. Little edible ones — pansies, borage, nasturtiums — can even be pressed into pale sugar cookies and baked and eaten up. Eating a flower feels very right to me.
Start a plant club with your friend who lives somewhere else. Take a picture of a plant on your walk, and tell your friend the plant’s name. You’ll know it because you’ll learn it. You can trade plants and talk about flowers and become mutually invested in the world as it changes.
Put seeds in the ground and ask them to grow. You know what will come up super fast for you? A sunflower. You can even plant a million sunflowers in an inch of soil in a lunch tray and when they’re an inch tall, you can eat them on salad. (“Microgreens,” the kids are saying.) The point isn’t to get from seed to sunflower; the point is to pay a lot of attention as the seed changes into a plant and pushes through the dirt. If you watch this with a lot of curiosity, you will want to write something about it.
Like, I mean, how does the plant know to trust that growing is the thing? At first, it comes out bent over, with its head still under there, having to do a whole lot of trusting. Look, I know plants can’t think. But can’t they?
Sing to plants. Singing is another wonderful thing to do while social distancing, and if you are lucky, you can sing without anyone hearing you because you’ll have a mask on and everyone has to stay six feet away from you. I believe with a stubborn firmness that singing is exactly the same amount of good for you as working out. Bodies want to sing. Especially in spring, bodies crave it. Birds are great at knowing and understanding this about singing. Humans are self conscious and that’s too bad.
Being able to name things is the same as making a habit of stretching the world out. The more you notice, the bigger everything is. When you ask a child to draw an old fashioned telephone without looking, she will draw a to-scale telephone, provided she knows what one is. But if you place the telephone in front of the child and you ask her to draw it, she will draw it huge, because she didn’t realize there were so many details to this object — all those buttons and ridges that disappear when everything is vague and unspecific. The details stretch the thing out, you see.
Last week, Jill — yes, the same Jill; how many Jills do you think I know? — asked me if I remembered the first bird I learned to identify and name on my own. I spouted off something about cedar waxwings, although I knew that wasn’t definitely true, because birds came to me in a bit of a flurry. I asked her if she knew hers. She said no, but she remembered her first plant ID with great specificity. It was wild hyacinth. “And this was the book I used,” she texted me later, along with this picture:
I remember my first flower, too. It’s still my favorite: a dogwood. There’s just something about plants, isn’t there? Maybe it is that they will sit still for you. If you keep returning, they’ll reward you for showing up again and again. Or maybe it’s that they’re so complex, but they don’t brag about it the way birds do. A Northern flicker will swoop down out of the sky, all ostentatious, like, “Look me! I’ve got polka dots! I’ve got golden wings! What do you have going on? You’re just fleshy human life-mud.” Flowers don’t yell like that, but they’re way more intricate than even the showiest bird. It took me ten times longer to draw those flowers (above) than it did to draw the birds last week. And I still didn’t get them right. You can’t get a flower right. They don’t let you.
What was that? Yes, definitely, I will be in your Plant Club. Thank you for asking.