In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Barbara Kingsolver writes that on Mother’s Day, in keeping with local tradition, they took a tomato plant to a neighbor. “Carrying the leggy, green-smelling plant, our family walked down the gravel driveway to her house at the bottom of our hollow. ‘Oh, well, goodness,’ she said, taking the plant from us and admiring it. ‘Well look at that.'”
In her region, she explains, you never say thank you for a plant. “If you do say it, they vow, the plant will wither up straightaway and die. They have lots of stories to back this up. They do not wish to discuss whether plants have ears, or what. Just don’t.”
Lucky me…when I moved into this house, I was also the recipient of plant gifts–including tomatoes. Imagine my surprise when black globes began to appear on one plant. Since I didn’t yet know the language of heirloom varieties, I thought they were diseased.
Other gifts were left over from earlier plantings by the one renter who loved growing things. Huge sunflowers. Oregano–several varieties. Alyssum, with its snowy sweet-smelling drifts of flowers.
Hops came over the fence from the neighbor’s house. “Hey!” I said to my husband. “We could make beer.”
The farm community where my husband grew up is at the heart of Anna’s new Kansas home. He said, “Sure. All we have to do is grow something like barley.”
Oh.
I didn’t realize you needed grain to make beer.
Kingsolver talks about how her husband grew an urban garden during graduate school and befriended some boys who would run through the alley. One time Steven pulled up a carrot and asked his astonished audience if they could think of another food that might be a root vegetable.
“Spaghetti?” one of them guessed.
Well, I wasn’t quite that bad. But never having grown plants in the damp Northwest, I had quite a learning curve from those first days including how to identify powdery mildew on my squash plants and what Neem oil is.
A friend in Ethiopia said, “Visitors come from the U.S. and ask me, ‘what’s the name of that plant? What’s that bird we’re hearing?’ but I grew up in the city. I say ‘Grass’ and ‘bird.'”
I learned to try hard to identify plants, though, after having the misfortune of nurturing a few invasive botanical bullies. Luckily, this one–gift from another sister–has brought nothing but beauty to my collection.
I’m so thankful for my sisters and other friends who shared and shared their plants and knowledge with me. As Kingsolver says about how her garden grew, my yard, too, has grown “higgledy-piggledy, florescent, and spontaneous, like friendship itself.”
