In this week’s issue of the Flyer, I wrote about Matt Vinson and Iris Valenzuela-Vinson’s mobile plant store, Viva La Plant Bus. To prepare for the piece, I also spoke with Amanda Willoughby and Eso Tolson, two Memphians making moves in the local art scenes, who are also well-known for their plant person status. For me, it was an absolute delight, and I hope our readers will feel the same.
I can’t remember my first “green thumb” moment. My mother, my dad, and my grandmother (we always called her Grannie) all kept houseplants and were all gardeners.
I can remember my mother darting over to some houseplant on a shelf in a restaurant and quickly snipping off a cutting to propagate it at home. Houseplants were more her forte; whereas, Grannie and my dad preferred to tend an outdoor garden. I remember picking blackberries at Grannie’s house, plucking green worms off the tomato vines, and shucking corn or snapping peas while sitting on the floor in her living room. She didn’t grow the latter two, but she traded with her neighbors.
My dad, meanwhile, turned the area around his little white house out in rural West Tennessee into something out of a storybook. That was after we lost our house in Midtown Memphis and around the time that my sister and I spent the school year in Phoenix, Arizona, with my mother. I think Dad wanted to give us something to look forward to, to transform the loss of stability into an excess of constantly transforming natural fireworks. So moss and lichen covered rocks in the yard, and dogwood trees and wildflowers blossomed between tall pine trees.
The lessons I took from my time bouncing between Memphis, Phoenix, and a little house out “in the country” are strangely similar to the lessons we, as a society at large, are refusing to learn from the last 20 months or so. The first and foremost lesson — that any community is only as healthy as its least-protected member — is not where I want to focus today. No, that’s a subject for another column; rather, I think we need to take a step back and remember that we are not separate from nature. We tend to think in binaries, to look at the world as the realm of the natural, distinct from the human-made world of cities and social hierarchies. But what we do affects the world, and the opposite is just as true.
More specifically, we’ve forgotten that all things operate in cycles. There is a growing season, but just as important is the time when a field lies fallow. Nutrients in the soil will be depleted, and quickly, if it’s made to overproduce. And the same hardy cacti that thrive in the arid Sonoran Desert will rot in Tennessee humidity. Plants are not one-size-fits-all. Nor are we meant to operate at the same capacity every day, but that’s what has been expected of nearly everyone during a global pandemic. We’ve seen mass death, but we haven’t allowed ourselves time to grieve.
Of course, these issues impact everyone to a different degree. Remote work isn’t always ideal, but it’s possible in the field of journalism. The same can’t be said for every job. And it seems to me to be one of our greatest failings that we demanded the economy to operate as usual, that goods and services should be as readily available as ever. We have built a system unable to tolerate the slightest disruption, and one that serves very few of us.
Many of the individual problems we’re struggling to address are symptomatic of this larger ailment, this refusal to admit that humans need time in which they aren’t required to be productive. I hope we can, instead of returning to normal, find a way to be better, to shape our economic system and social structures to benefit each of us.
In short, I hope we grow.
