Each plant is like a new word

One day I was listening to a Sustainable World Radio podcast where the host Jill was asking her interviewee about some of his favourite plants. He mentioned lambsquarters, and she cooed about how much she loved them too. and they talked for a while about how they are like spinach but even people who don’t like spinach could like them because the flavour is so mild. I was only half paying attention.

Then the following day I was in the park sketching the plants convenient to the tree stump I was sitting on and I found myself drawing an oddly U-shaped plant with narrow leaves and closely packed seed heads. I looked it up and discovered it was — what do you know, lambsquarters. The leaves looked too small to make it much of a food plant so today I checked again, some other specimens with larger leaves, and then as I was walking home along the path through the park, they suddenly started appearing wherever I looked.

It made me think of the experience of learning a new word and then suddenly starting to hear it or read it everywhere. And by association how learning the plants is like learning the nouns of a new language. Or maybe they are more like verbs. Reflecting on Robin Kimmerer’s “grammar of animacy” I think we would have to say that plants are be-ings in the most active sense, encompassing a lot of doing even in their apparently stationary habits. And also that learning how to speak to them is mostly a matter of listening