On this cold April day, many seeds still wait underground, but with a few days of warmth, they will crack open, the tiny rootlets will poke out, find their way to sustenance, and their first seed leaves will appear. A seed at birth is already programed to be the fullest expression of itself. It arrives on the planet with all the knowledge it needs. The seed knows when to grow and how to respond to warmth. As it develops leaves, it takes up nutrients, drinks in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. The seed is a storehouse for a great reservoir of knowledge, of shared history, and experience. As it becomes a mature plant, it knows what to give another plant struggling nearby and to send out warnings to its tribe of approaching danger. The smallest seed only needs to find itself in a hospitable environment to flourish. For it will respond to whatever it encounters. The influences of the outside environment affect it, be it toxins, or a great flood, hail, a heat wave, or a blessed perfect growing season.
I lived my first seven years in a row house in the industrial city of Chester, Pennsylvania. I didn’t know about seeds, but I was always attracted to one plant. When I was about six years old, I remember walking alone into the alley behind our row house, carrying a metal kitchen bowl. It was the insert from the classic Revere Ware double boiler. Then, seating myself on the concrete near a patch of weeds, I gathered the seed stalks of this plant that grew in abundance. I rubbed my fingers up the stem against the grain, and the seeds, small, elongated, and soft, fell silently into the bowl. Myriads of individual entities.
In my world were my parents, my younger brother, Jon, Albert, a boy who lived across the street, Charlene who lived a few doors away and whose mother was always home when we came home from school, our housekeeper, Louise, and somewhere, further away, my parents’ drugstore where they worked every day. My world was small, but this bowl was filled with the largest number of anything I could imagine. So many small bits all neatly together filling the bowl. When it was almost full, I lowered my fingers into the bowl and trailed my fingers through the perfect seeds. Moving my hand around and through and under, the seeds shifted and tickled my fingers. Soothing and sensual is how I remember the experience. Even at this young age, or perhaps because of it, my hand in this bowl of seeds connected me to something peaceful and true.
Later, after I became an apple orchardist, I learned that the weed was plantain, an herbal remedy for insect stings and other skin abrasions. You only have to pick a few leaves, chew them, and rub them or poultice them onto a wound and they withdraw toxins and soothe. The taste is not sweet, not bitter, not pungent or sharp, just a mash of green leaves.
Sketch of Plantain Seed Stalks and Leaves, Linda Hoffman, 2020
I am allergic to bees. When I am stung, which inevitably happens several times a year, I know exactly where to find plantain. It grows on the side our farmhouse near the back door. Growing in this most unglamorous place, it doesn’t announce its presence, but it is tenacious enough to grow despite other weeds and grasses. It even survives the mower. In cities, plantain grows in vacant lots and in cracks of the sidewalk. Plantain seems to be totally nonchalant about its closest neighbors or the soil chemistry. It grows both where soils are poor and where they are fertile. It forges a home in forgotten nooks and crannies.
Plantain beginning to grow along the driveway in front of the Farmhouse, April 4, 2020
Plants offer their unique gifts. For example, poison ivy grows in disturbed areas. It also flourishes in unstable ecosystems like on the dunes on Cape Cod, appearing as if to say, “Keep off of this fragile bank.” When a friend recovering from chemo treatments, mentioned poison ivy had sprung up outside her front door, I smiled and said, “It wants to protect you.” And when I am feeling tired, I lean my head into a tall clump of mountain mint, and its strong menthol scent enlivens my spirit.
I no longer live in Chester, Pennsylvania, but on a small farm where I can plant seeds and tend the earth. I think of the billions of people who can’t do this, I think of my stepdaughters in their small apartment in Brooklyn, listening to sirens, eating rice and beans, and my grandchildren who have been told not to go out because there is sickness outside. I long to bring them to the farm and show them the rows of seeds growing, to listen to peepers and wood frogs, to share the plumping of the apple buds, and see plantain, the healer, poking out. But for now, this is the way it is.
The myriad seeds in that long ago bowl connected me to something outside myself, to something far beyond my immediate world. As I sit alone now in isolation, I think about this world with more people than I can conceive of—almost eight billion people. Every single person on the planet born a unique and perfect being. Like a seed, we must grow in this imperfect world. We, too, have much innate wisdom, we know what needs to be done.
Catalpa Tree, watercolor, Linda Hoffman, 2019