Speak to Me of Summer
36: Everything in Bloom
Hey friends!
Now’s as good a time as any to start from the beginning... Hey. My name is Chevanne. Irish pronunciation1. Nice to meet you.
You don’t see much of my face here and since some are meeting me for the first time (👋🏾), I’ll break the ice with one fact about me:
I’m a plant mom.
In spring 2020, there was nowhere to go but the grocery store, a precarious act of weaving past immunologic threats, and the garden center. I had never been to the one near my town, even as a resident of over a decade. I thought myself a black thumb (no melanin intended), so all I ever did was stroll the aisles in Home Depot and lament my lack of horticultural intuition. But being mostly outside at the garden center, I could breathe. I could let my thoughts wander away from the world’s faceless killer, from the grief of my personal loss2, from all that had been upended in this mad new world.
A local park had become a psychological refuge over a decade ago during a very bad time in my life and the garden center harkened back to the Saturdays I drove swiftly through traffic, rain or shine, to be among the budding magnolias, flick the flaking skin of a paperbark maple3, and lean down low, tracing my eyes along a pathway dusted with bright green moss. I had a new place to center myself.
The garden center also introduced me to new friends: the coral succulent, rubber tree plant, Goodwin lavender, and pineapple mint. I got to know those aisles like lines on my hands, then one day picked up my first plants.
On sunny days, my then four-year old would saunter out onto the terrace in his boxers, lugging his watering can to help me feed the chocolate mint, thyme, and rosemary. He’d teeter and strain to hold up the can to our growing zz plant and pick at the string of pearls with a mischievous eye. From then on the cycles came and went. I learned more and more about soil, fertilizer, dying back, blooming, light, warmth, growth, and resilience.
My birthday is in the fall and I’ve always loved the toasty fall days with a light sweater that felt like being wholly in your body. The temperature is just right. But spring. Spring. Then summer. Speak to me of summer… My chlorophyll children would burst with shining joy and I’d watch them as bees gathered to sip nectar. I started treating myself a bit like a plant too, languishing in the sun with lunch or thudding music and a glass as sweaty as my skin.
It’s not so much the nice weather, but the bloom, the awakening, the fragrance. Things are alive and I with them.
During a writing group prompt, I got inspired by the work of Kira Jane Buxton, writer of Hollow Kingdom. This poem is one sunk deep in the world of plants.
This spiritless dirt is not earth
It is not root and rotting leaf or grass seed
It is torn from the beating pulse of the forest
Laid orphaned and sanitized among other captives
It sits idle and alone, cut off
Awaiting death or resuscitation
Whichever its merciful master desires.
Seasons melt and crystallize and still we await a return
To the creeping of vines
The bloom of mushrooms
The patter of hooves, packing them down
As the forest breaths with winged brethren and pumps with unassailable life
The potted
The kept
We call to them on butterfly wings
Through bee and beetle
And to their keepers
That they would return our family to the circle
To the shade and warmth of fern and paw
To the network of living lichen and song of soil
Return them
Return them
Cinched and dry dirt pulls away
From the borders of the pot
Answering the call to curl and reach for home
We beckon for them to stretch
For their roots to tangle and meet ours
For their history to be beat into their stems
What life can spring that does not know wind?
To be made hearty with the touch of bird calls?
Our leaves are dimension and depth
Guides of old
That know what is beyond time
That hold words of sky and sea
Return them
Return them
What’s next?
Review of Buxton’s Hollow Kingdom
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shi VAHN, stress on the second syllable; Apparently there’s a character on the show Succession with the same name. Goes by Shiv. I happened to go by chiv (meaning “dagger” bwahaha!) on IG and Twitter. ☝🏾
You can read my guest piece from The Turnstone about that loss. Thanks to
for one of my first collaborations.
One of the most interesting trees I’ve ever seen. Google it!
This brief, beautiful essay knocked me out. It is just lovely. Each word. Each image. I will never look at the aisles of the garden center without thinking of your wanderings through them, building your relationship with plants and keeping your connection with the seasons. Your poem captures that thing I've often thought of when I plant in pots using dirt pulled from a bag that may or may not have a tenuous relationship with a forest floor.
Thank you for this.
I loved this!! Just subscribed and found this while scrolling through. Fellow plant mom here too 👋🏾 🌱 and I thought I was a weirdo for being obsessed with just walking through home supply stores where I could just look at plants. This was so lovely ❤️