The world of plants is fascinating—the range of simple shapes doubling into themselves and transforming from seed to plant to flower and back to seed, often architectural, elegantly designed so that their form enables their function.

I love the strange, otherworldly and alien plants, the survivors of cold, darkness, and the unusual things that grow in ways we humans would not think possible.

It is amazing how plants adapt to the specifics of their environment, so that they grow in the cracks of sidewalks, lodged between bricks in a building, or nestled in the crotches of trees. Some get their nutrients from the air, others from consuming insects, and still others live in the shadows and root systems of their host plants, benefiting from that relationship, time, and place so much that their removal will mean their death. I admire this tenacity, this opportunism, this survival skill. Live, or die. In fact, live to die. Most plants flower profusely before they perish, having the biological need to produce more offspring through the seed the flowers will set.

As a gardener, I will sit, staring at a patch of earth, and see far more than the mere greenery inhabiting that space. It is not that I am a visionary, I am simply compelled by the memory of the moment I first dug that spot—when I discovered the particular crumble of that soil, the huge earthworms, the promise of healthy plants—and the seasons that spot has seen are all logged in my brain, from the first winter die-back to the renewal brought by spring. Plants give me hope, they remind me of my absolutes—cold, hot, wet, thirsty, stiff—bending one more time or lugging one more thing, satisfying this compulsion that borders on illness.

Ultimately, my homage to Nature is to bow, to notice, to to record—acknowledging this brilliance that I cannot explain but can feel.