Plantcestry™: Beginnings
Since I was but a wee growing thing (see photo), I’ve been enamored of everything that grows. Fronded, furred, feathered, if it was alive, it had me at hello.
As a child my affections skewed Animal –- their activeness, their personality, their easy anthropomorphism –- but as I grew, I couldn’t help but notice plants. Plants were everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Crack in the sidewalk? Plants. Compacted elementary school playground? Plants. Just about every surface or situation imaginable produced plants, plants, PLANTS. And so it followed that plants and their planty ways pitched camp in a particularly aspiring corner of my mind like gypsies, and there they’ve stayed.
You’ll find I’m a sentimental person. Nostalgia comes easily, and though I think I share the typical memories most people do of the march into adulthood, with my memories come memories of plants. Thus the Vegetable have quietly inserted themselves into every corner of my life, tendril and root, such that when I think back on family Christmas at grandparents’, my mind wanders to the Christmas fern my grandmother grew in a raised bed by the back patio, which she’d collected from a wild colony and said the roots grew to China.
Maybe it’s that inevitable march into adulthood, but at 30, I found myself ever more cognizant of the paucity of roots in my own life, my lack of connection to a past that is in any way storied. I come from a small, disparate family, my grandparents and their siblings products of a culture and an age in which clan members became more mobile, their families more nuclear. Genealogies have been traced with some success, but in the end what is a genealogy but a piece of paper? I see the connections, but I don’t feel them.
What I can say with some measure of certainty is that my ancestors, more and less immediate, were people of the land. They grew stuff, and most of the stuff they grew was plants. It’s plants, I’ve found, that give me a window into their world, and thereby a mirror of my own, and it’s through plants that I will attempt, here, to map another type of genealogy: my own natural history.
Hop on. It’s going to be interesting.
- Posted by AK on 2010 Jan 11 at 1122
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I am looking forward to being an observer of your own beautiful and idiosyncratic version of “Roots” (too bad they already used that title). Thanks for inviting us along for the ride.
Thank you so much, Kerry! Indeed, “Plantcestry” doesn’t so much roll off the tongue in the same way “Roots” does, does it? Ah, well…
Ah, see… the foodies want us to all think that memory is all locked up in kitchen cutlery and scrawled, stained recipe cards. But many of us are wise enough to know that a beloved tool or favorite flower can be Proustian, too.
@Pamela: Totally! That is, in part, what I intend to discuss.
That’s where RW&G started, you know. Conversations with my mother about my father’s garden sprinkled with my own interest in war propaganda. Et voila!
Beware the horticultural madeleine, for it can change your world. =)
I grew up with a mother who always had flower gardens-I thought I got my love of it from her until in her 70′s she told me that she always hated gardening, but loved the flowers… hmmmm. Will genetics win out in old age?
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@Pamela: That’s pretty darn cool. I think my family were all farmers anyway during WWII. Maybe they called their gardens victory gardens for the heck of it?
@Susan: Ha! I hope not. :-) I’m reading your blog on a regular basis now, I’m curious about your garden based on your descriptions, and I’m anxious to watch how it continues to evolve.
“Victory gardens” were more often in cities, though there were some exceptions. Like you, my people were farmers, so it wasn’t a term they used to describe their own gardens. That said, my mother remembers the term from the era, all part of government propaganda.
Also, and this is some serious bird-walking, but my father’s family was probably MORE affected by governmental efforts at encouraging food preservation (ex., canning). My mother’s mom and dad worked at Gulf Coast canneries in the ’20s, but her friend’s mother used to participate in “group” canning efforts right after the war.
Your posts are going to make me cry; I just know it. This is a beautiful first post about beginnings. Bravo to you for making yourself vulnerable, for connecting us with your past and, though it, your present, and for enriching us with your spirited story-telling. Waiting with bated breath for the next installment…
Looking forward to following your journey through your Plantcestry. I think for many of us gardeners our transformation into gardeners began with a family member who gardened or perhaps it was the rose bush or rosemary that we walked past every day going to elementary school. It just seems that passionate gardeners have some story to tell about how they evolved into this state.
@Price: These are great stories! I’m intrigued to hear more.
@Lynn and @backyardwisdom: Thanks so much, guys! Yes, there’s a degree to which I feel like I’m “putting myself out there,” but then I do want this to be a personal blog, so it’s important for me to investigate the personal aspects of why I’m a gardener and what plants mean to me.