Plants

Plants

Before plants arrive, a garden is a meeting of land and a gardener, held as a kind of dream. Where they meet, the dream is planted, and plants happen. They are the response to the conditions. They are the effect.

Plants express the garden continuously. As conditions change, they change. Water ebbs and flows, temperatures rise and fall, a gardener comes and goes. Plants respond. They are not static. They adapt. They are effects living in time.

When we talk about plants, it is easy to lump them into one group. But there is little use in talking about plants in general. They may be similar, but they are not the same. Each plant carries its own adaptations, and will respond to its situation differently.

The response of plants may not be verbal, but it is visible. Form, growth, timing, change, these responses are physical. The same plant will express itself differently in different conditions. Sometimes a difference of a few feet is the difference between growth and death. The signal is physical change.

To read plants, two things matter: attention and time. Attention asks, how is the plant, right now? Time elaborates. Repeated attention reveals change. Without time, attention gives the gardener only a snapshot, an image without context. There is no reference for what the plant usually does. But time, without a gardener’s attention, leaves the plant to its own devices. It may grow. It may also overgrow. Plants do things when they are unattended.

An attentive gardener who visits a garden’s plants over time is well set to shape their lives. But that influence is never total. A gardener can guide, but there is no complete command of plants. Plants, as expressions of changing conditions, will always change themselves. Years bring different patterns of rain and temperature, and plants will express those. Your judgment of a plant’s situation will always be necessary, and always incomplete. And that is okay.

Spending time with plants reveals how plants live in time. This life is slow and cyclical. Trees outgrow humans, and sometimes our dwellings. Plants do not hurry, but they do not delay.