We’re at the tail end of a long stretch of warm weather storms. Just like spring, summer came early — the hot, muggy days expected of July went ahead and showed up in late May. Fans are set up in every room. Beds have been stripped of their comforters. Ice cubes clink in sweaty glasses of water. And every day brings a rain shower of varying intensity. Today, the thick white cloud cover overhead is slowly shifting to gray. Sharp gusts of cool wind burst through dense canopies as if to say, “Get ready.”

Before I moved to Chicago, my understanding of summer storms was sorely limited and essentially flawed. The “rainy season” in Southern California mostly comprised of a few weeks in November when the ground goes damp and everyone forgets how to drive. Here in the Midwest, I’ve learned the extreme weather season lasts all year.

My first big warm weather storm happened during my first summer in Chicago. I was in college at the time and paid $270 a month to live two blocks from campus in a sunroom with white-framed windows on three walls. The subsequent winter would see me huddled by a space heater, attempting to ignore the frost growing on both sides of my single paned glass. But in the warm season, windows and curtains stayed open to let the breeze flow through. The room was my refuge in the trees. I spent much of that first summer sitting in the window sill, watching the lazy handful of neighborhood kids and graduate students jaywalk three floors below.

One afternoon in my bedroom, I noticed the light change. The buttery yellow walls had begun to glow a hazy orange. I leaned closer to the window screen and struggled to focus my eyes on the sky, sidewalk, brick buildings across the street. Everything was bathed in the eerie orange light, deepening rapidly. The air hummed with electricity. The cloud cover thickened and before long, the sky let loose an angry spew of hail that turned green lawns white and rattled violently against our cement facade. As quickly as it came, the hail slowed and then stalled, melting away and taking the thick orange sky with it. Hot, wet asphalt and leaves fat with the weight of water were left behind as the only evidence of the storm.

In the years since, there have been many more hailstorms, some worse than others. We’ve had thunderstorms that blew out power for entire neighborhoods, powerful stabs of wind that felled the oldest trees, curbside flooding that turned intersections into lakes. There was even that year when we were first introduced to the legendary derecho. A this point, I’ve had a lot of experience with this city’s intense weather. But every time the sky darkens and the winds ripple through wildly swaying trees, I’m still surprised.

I suppose it’s the city’s brush with untamed nature. We don’t have craggy mountains to arch our necks at, or vast oceans to dive, or deep forests to wander. Chicago’s natural beauty has been largely leveled to make way for historic feats of architecture, temples of culture and academia, and a few hundred lovingly tended urban parks. But the weather is our great equalizer. We’re all cold on the hundredth straight day of freezing temperatures in April, and we’re all in awe of the uncontrollable power of a wild summer storm. It doesn’t matter how much we try to insulate ourselves with society and technology. One way or another, nature always overpowers, stuns, delays, distracts, reroutes, impresses, terrifies, and drenches us.

The breeze outside picks up speed and the windchimes on our back porch sing louder and more often. A distant rumble of thunder echoes, and the skies churn from bright white to a swirling gray. When today’s storm breaks, I have my face pressed hard to the glass. I watch in awe as the army of droplets fall, and as the wind blows unknowable patterns in the soaked and shining streets.

Last month I launched a newsletter, a monthly missive recapping past blog posts and compiling some of my favorite articles/posts/images from the vast, bottomless web.

Among the political muck, endless digital advertisements, and sponsored posts, there remain a few people who choose to garden, to observe the natural world around them and share their perspectives online. My newsletter features their stories as well as my own, putting writers and artists from vastly different areas and backgrounds in conversation with each other. This is the green internet; a growing, fluid place where we can share and plan and think about nature during the times when, for whatever reason, we’re not able to just go be in it. Here’s a glimpse of last month’s inaugural memo.

If you like what happens here on Darker than Green, then you may very well enjoy this bonus slice of internet I’ve been working on. A new newsletter goes out this week. And I promise it will be filled with plants, poetry, activism, awareness, and all the other things that keep us going.

Sign up here.

(Another, slightly more fleshed out version of this essay is on Medium. The thoughts below were written in a frenzy after watching Lemonade the weekend it was released.)

Mother dearest, let me inherit the Earth.

The first few frames of Lemonade show weeds and reeds rustling in the wind, growing out of literal ruins. The framing device — a giant, mature live oak tree, dripping with Spanish moss — is the constant, the ever-present protection and watcher, growing still despite its painful Southern history. A cluster of powerful, creative, assertive black women adorn its branches, gazing firmly into the camera. Later, those same women will till the fertile earth and pull from it food and sustenance, coaxing life from the land, coated in color and sunlight.

Continue…

Yesterday afternoon we got back to Chicago after a week in Asheville, North Carolina. In so many ways, the two places couldn’t be more different, and I know I’ll be struggling for some time to readjust to life here in the Midwest. In the meantime, I’m slowly processing my photos, remembering the incredible places we went and the native plants I mentally catalogued, and burning souvenir sticks of balsam fir incense that, wondrously, smell exactly like Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Almost as if the digital gods decided to smile upon me, today my feed was filled with glorious photos of sunset cliffs and gleaming blue alpine lakes, locked up with quotes from the Thoreaus/Carsons/Muirs of our shared ecological history. It’s Earth Day. Which, to be honest, I had forgotten because I generally avoid looking at calendars when I’m on vacation. And though I couldn’t celebrate the day from the backcountry, at least I was able to reminisce about my own recent outdoor excursions and bask in the unabashed naturelove of my friends’ friends.

The other way I celebrated this day was by picking up trash. Standard fare, I know, but important nonetheless. Upon returning to Chicago, my eyes blinked new again, remembering and noticing the vast array of street garbage piled against business facades and below residential gating. So I grabbed the paper bag blowing down the sidewalk (the one my faulty vision originally registered as a wild bunny) and filled it with trash until the handles broke and the corners threatened to burst.

The lesson here is: use what you’ve got before buying more of it. Especially in light of how traditional Earth Day cleanups may actually be creating more garbage. Either way, I’ve found the best garbage bag is the one tumbling down the street right in front of you. And you don’t have to wait until this time next year to organize your own foraged cleanup. Wherever there’s a littered bag, there’s likely litter nearby begging for a home.

And so was born my Earth Day dispatch. Tomorrow will bring more green thinking and probably more garbage grabbing because I just can’t help myself. This place, Chicago, is home, even with its litter and noise, but its long-awaited turn toward spring and warmth is undeniable and finally upon us. Still, simultaneously, I’m thinking fondly of Asheville and trying to hold tightly to the clear evening light and the tree leaf rustle and the specific music of the birds outside our temporary home.

There’s a part of me that deeply and actively loves nature; boldly surrounding myself with it, shamelessly looking at it, smelling it, plunging my hands into it, listening for evidence of it, paying close attention to its myriad expressions. There’s another part of me that knows it’s a temporary love, a love defined by an essential distance. I am part of nature, but I am separate from it. I know nature, but being human I can never fully integrate into it. I can observe and appreciate and cultivate, but I will also clumsily inhibit and knowingly destroy.

I find myself living in two times: today, current time, when there is still beauty and life worth protecting; and the barren future, the time which will come to be, when our haphazard misuse of the land and aggressive overconsumption of its resources renders the earth uninhabitable for our species and all the others.

This dual existence has a name: shadowtime. A concept developed to describe an understanding of the world on two distinct but somehow simultaneous timescales. It’s the unsettling realization that the way we live now is most likely going to be very different, very soon.

I often struggle to reconcile my relatively quiet tendencies toward nature writing and outdoor recreation with the tumultuous anarchy and deep environmental chaos that I feel we’re hurtling toward. I’ve been a conservation steward, spearheaded greening movements, and voted for candidates who stump for ecological causes. But there remains a dull ache. A pinprick of worry that it’s too late and we can’t fix it.

So what do we do? Well, I write, of course. And I also read. These days there’s an endless stream of environmental reportage, most of which is either boring (let’s be honest), or too terrifying to fully comprehend. But every so often something equal parts informative and engaging rises to the surface. A perfect example is Robert Macfarlane’s recent piece in The Guardian, Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever.

It’s an incredible introduction to the current geological era, and a selected catalogue of the contemporary writing and art it has inspired. The piece is ambitious and excellent, and I’m fascinated by the ways artists are interpreting and connecting over this concept. It would be easy to crumble under the weight of understanding that our actions today will be worn in the earth’s strata record for millions of years. But artists are approaching the environmental debate in a different way: by developing new terms to describe the emotional impact of living in a world on a deadline; by unapologetically painting an accurately fearsome future for us to ponder; by connecting to the earth via connecting to their own human instinct for shared narrative. By doing what they do best: creating.

Perhaps creating is the only comfort we have in the face of our difficult reality and future. The impulse to create definitely carries its own brand of uncertain turbulence. But it may still be the only relief we get from the looming weight of shadowtime.

I’m trying to take my outdoor garden space more seriously this year. I always take time spent outdoors seriously. When there are only about 170 days in the growing season, you make the most of it. Even when you’re not actively growing anything.

But this year I want to be an outdoor gardener. I want to walk out on our back porch and be surrounded by green, by sprouts that root deeply and grow to spill over the sides of our rickety deck railing. I want it to be lush. I want herbs and perennials and native grasses. So I’m amassing prairie seeds from local seed savers, and hoarding large volume outdoor pots, and learning the ins and outs of artificial cold stratification. The farmer’s almanac says I still have some time before last frost, so I’m trying to soak up all the information I can before heading outdoors.

Of course, I’m not starting from scratch. I’ve grown plants indoors for years, decades now. I’ve had some trial and error. I’ve killed some plants and helped others thrive. I have experience. But something about this transition feels daunting. I feel a bit like I’m staring into the deep green unknown where a million septuagenarians are holding tight their best kept secrets for getting a second flush of tall thimbleweed blooms. I’ve only successfully overwintered plants once. I know nothing about making compost. Suddenly, it feels like I’ve got a lot to learn.

The nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my indoor plant collection was that it was a garden. I’d never heard anyone describe my overachiever’s hobby in quite those words. It was said by a friend of ours to his two year old son. He encouraged his boy to look at all the plants. That weren’t they nice? That they were a garden, just like ones they’ve seen outside. I saw recognition flutter over the boy’s eyes and if someone had been looking at me, they probably would have seen the same flutter in mine.

It was the first time I’d considered my collection of houseplants as anything more than a haphazard assortment, slowly and accidentally pieced together over thirteen years of living in a manic urban tundra. I’ve since looked around at the crowd of aging terra cotta pots and the greenery they hold and I realize I have indeed built a garden. The varied sizes and textures of the foliage, the drifts of color and contrasting variegation in the leaves, the transitions of growth and the seasonal interest — it’s all happening indoors too.

What makes us add the qualifier in front when we call ourselves “indoor gardeners”? Yes, it’s helpful to add some detail as to location and general point of view. I know a container garden has different needs from one that’s sown directly into the ground. But I hope our insistence on specifying where the gardening is happening isn’t indicating that what we’re doing is somehow less involved, less skilled. The care and monitoring and pruning that my inside plants require is real. Just as real as any deadheading or hardening off or N-P-Ks needed by the ones outside.

So, come last frost, I’ll be heading outdoors. I’ll be trying out some new species, expanding my glossary of terms, firming up my maintenance schedule, and building on my existing store of knowledge. I’m anticipating some growth. And some heartbreak. I’m ready for the challenge. And if all else fails, I know I can always come back inside, where I first set roots long ago.

If we hurried, I could see it
before it closed to contemplate
becoming seed.
Hand in hand, we entered
the light-spattered morning-dark woods.
Where he pointed was only a white flower
until I saw him seeing it.

from “Ruellia Noctiflora” by Marilyn Nelson


Poems can be tough. I remember in grade school we all thrilled when our teachers introduced a unit on poetry, expecting the work to be quick and the homework painless. But we quickly discovered poems to be self-sustaining universes; each line its own world, each word a city block with millions of possible meanings.

In “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry” editor Camille T. Dungy has invited readers to reconsider the anatomy of the nature poem, and to reconsider the cultural and ethnic makeup of that poem’s author. Since being brought to the new world, Africans and African Americans have cultivated a unique, complex, and often fraught relationship with the land. These poems shed light on the pain and the reality of that history. And they also celebrate it, observing the beauty of the Earth, and our own beauty within it. Even works written from the city dweller’s perspective sound and feel different when read through nature’s lens.

The collection is organized into ten thematic cycles, each introduced with an essay written by one of the anthology’s represented poets. Themes include observation (the elements of the Earth, the beauty of living beings, finding ourselves in nature), confrontation (what happens when the land turns its back on you, natural disasters, and violence bestowed on us in this place), and reconciliation (largely embodied in the gorgeous-from-start-to-finish section titled “Comes Always Spring”).

The poems are beautiful. Some are angry and difficult. Most demand multiple reads — if not for comprehension, then for wanting to be enveloped just one more time. Each poem opens up its writer’s world, just a little, inviting you in to find yourself and your own experience between the line breaks and punctuation. As poems, they are evocative and insightful. As nature poems, they are gloriously visual and sensual. As black nature poems, they are all of the above, as well as indicative of our particular experiences as keepers, stewards, and inhabitants of this land.

My favorite aspect of the collection was the conversation each cycle of poems opened up between the pages and generations. The sections aren’t organized chronologically, so words written in the 18th and 19th centuries, by men and women born into slavery, share space with pieces written just in the past decade. As the book unfolds, the reader can’t help but gain a clearer understanding of the depth and history of our relationship to the Earth, discovering that even as time may pass, many things have stayed the same for us. Fascination with the world’s wild species. Fear of nature’s wrath, and the wrath of those we may encounter within it. Pride in the land, and pride in our own resilience. And joy and delight in the inevitable return of Spring.

This is a wonderful collection, one that I devoured during my daily commutes, saving me from myself during so many furious, traffic-bound bus rides. It introduced me to writers I hadn’t heard of, and reminded me of writers I’ve been wanting to return to. It also introduced me to myself, to a tradition that I’m clearly part of, to a legacy of listening to and learning from the Earth. A legacy that stretches far beyond me in both directions.

Buy on Indiebound / Buy on Amazon

I am fortunate to have been raised in Southern California by my mother, another avid plant lover. I was taught names like philodendron, jacaranda, and agapanthus as soon as I was old enough to pronounce them. Freeways lined with bougainvillea and curbside cacti were the backdrop of my early life. I don’t think my mom planned to turn me into a gardener, just as I don’t think she planned to turn me into a writer. But both happened and her influence is undeniable.

In my house growing up, we had two things in abundance: books and plants. They crowded just about every room, even the kitchen. They were constants. Plants crowded the front windows in our living room, bigger than me, eager for sunshine, and largely self-sufficient. I barely remember my mom watering them, but the pruning was perpetual. Even in family members’ houses or dentist offices, my mom’s wiry hands would find their way into other peoples’ plants, picking at yellowed leaves and pulling at dusty overgrowth. When I feel my fingers inch toward my friends’ forgotten foliage, I know exactly where the habit came from.

I grew into a flower child. I memorized the names of standard grocery store blooms and generally adopted the perspective of a budding hippie. I snatched up weeds and grasses for rough little bouquets while wearing Peace Love and Happiness necklaces from Claire’s. I recycled religiously. I got bussed out to rustic and upscale Topanga Canyon for school-led hikes where we learned to forage for nasturtium greens and the sour stems of the buttercup oxalis. I took up photography in my teens and spent entire rolls of 35mm on fleshy agave leaves.

When I moved to the midwest for college, I marveled at how different the trees were, at how ivy engulfed brick houses whole, at how distanced people seemed from their natural environment. For the first time in my life, I witnessed littering in action. I figured out what winter is really like. I discovered a whole new roster of plants, and learned to appreciate them even more as they died back in fall and miraculously returned each spring.

I bought my first plant when I studied abroad in France: a small green fittonia with bright white veins. I gave it a place of prominence in my dorm room, hoping to make those four walls feel more like home. When I flew back to the states, I mourned its loss as much as I mourned no longer living in Paris. In 2007, when I moved into my first solo apartment in Chicago, a potted plant is what made that little studio really feel like mine. The young tell tale heart coleus thrived in my west facing window, and though it may be scraggly, it’s still in my collection, growing slowly larger with each passing year.

That first apartment became my safe haven, and a welcome home for my budding family of houseplants. Most members began as small starts, or cuttings gifted from friends. Others joined the group when their owners thought them dead and watched on in disbelief as I patiently brought them back.

I’ve bribed friends with cars to help me move twice since that apartment. In 2010, my plants limped through life in a well-appointed apartment with unfortunate northern exposure. In 2012, I moved northwest to my current home, my giant dracaena fragrans trailing out of the back of a friend’s SUV, waving to passersby along Milwaukee Avenue. In 2015, I spread out and took my gardening habit outside, which is where I spotted an abandoned monstera deliciosa in the garbage heap. I dragged it up to my balcony and helped it sprout new roots in a mason jar. It recently unfurled its first new leaf.

Every plant has a story, and every story marks the start of a new moment in my own life. Over the years, the plants have taught me patience and gratitude and humility. They continuously bring me joy and pride. They’ve introduced me to friends and connected me with my family; a fact I’m reminded of whenever I talk to my mom about her own voracious garden. Or when I think back to my grandparents’ muggy New Orleans sunroom, where Katrina barreled through dozens of tropical specimens and decades of family memories.

I didn’t realize I was a Plant Person until a couple of years ago when it dawned on me that in an emergency, my plants would be the only possessions I would regret not being able to save. I never intended to fill my windows — and my life — with leaves and branches and vines. To dole out garden advice to friends and coworkers. To eagerly absorb plant knowledge from my elders. To happily memorize latin names and kitchen remedies. But it seems that things usually progress as they were meant to.

There’s still so much to learn, and in many ways I still I feel like a total beginner. But I know I’m a plantswoman. I have been all along.

All the photos from this post were taken in high school with my trusty Pentax ZX-M.

Like many living things, and some people too, plants are experts in communication and forgiveness. They’ll give off signs of distress when something’s not quite right. If you can figure out what’s going on (and be patient), they’ll perk back up and shoot out new roots. They’re supremely adaptable. So despite my deep devotion, most of my plants have experienced some level of trauma. It’s rarely been dire, though in those moments I’ve tried to pay attention and adopt some of the quiet lessons they teach. Perseverance, subtlety, flexibility. Remembering that it won’t always be perfect. That growth happens in both directions.

Four years ago, I brought home a small African Milk Tree (Euphorbia trigona). It looked something like a greenish purple candelabra, with a few branches jutting out from the main trunk. Short prickly spines and clusters of teardrop-shaped leaves ran down along its ridged arms. It was sculptural and healthy and looked unlike any plant I’d previously cared for.

I stuck it in a place of prominence, on the western facing windowsill, the sunniest spot in the house. It seemed to settle in well, so I didn’t pay it much attention, watering it maybe once a month. Less in the winter, really whenever I remembered. I’ve learned that plants do best when you bring home the ones that will fit into your lifestyle. If you won’t remember to check your hygrometer daily, your fern collection is probably not going to work out. Likewise, if you love watering plants daily and have tons of time on your hands, you may mean well, but you could end up drowning your cactus.

The euphorbia and I were a solid match. It quietly reminded me of the huge desert plants I grew up around in L.A. and I welcomed the nostalgia, especially during the darker months when snow abounds and truly sunny days are scarce. I found a small kind of joy in noticing the plant’s seasonal growth spurts, changes in color, loss of leaves, and dormancy. I measured the progress of the passing months in number of new branches and handfuls of crisped up leaflets that I diligently threw out. I was proud.

This past December, we took inventory and gave all the plants a good examination while insulating the windows. Carefully taking the euphorbia down from the windowsill, I realized how big it had gotten over the years. Its tallest arm easily reached my chin. The plant that started at 12″ tall was now almost as big as me.

When it came time to put it back in the window, I set it somewhat back from the frame. It stood for a few days, leaning precariously, its top-heavy limbs bowed by gravity’s pull. I hoped that the sun and its promise of chlorophyll would persuade it to straighten out, but as you may be able to guess, it didn’t quite work out that way. One recent evening I heard the unmistakeable sound of collapse. I watched, almost in slow motion, as the plant fell over the side of the table, onto the floor, and into a giant pile of dry soil and tangled limbs. Arms broke off. Its spines pierced its skin and released tiny beads of stale smelling white liquid.

Had this been my first plant, I probably would have cried. But I knew the deal. Some growth had been lost, but we would both recover. The drama was temporary and life would go on. The plant is now being held upright with the help of twine and the weight of a neighboring bookcase. It’s not the most visually pleasing solution, but it works. Since the fall, many leaves have crisped and died. The colors of the plant have darkened from emerald green to a deep eggplant. The cycles of growth and dieback are progressing as they usually would. The giant tumble was just a moment.

Living with plants has taught me a lot about myself. About what to get upset about, and what to let go. About how much effort to put into something, and what I should or can expect in return. About the joy of caring for something other than myself, and the joy of feeling cared for. About being observant and training myself not to take things for granted. I’m learning that I’m more capable of forgiveness than I used to be: toward others and toward myself. I have the plant to thank for that, the plant and its unrelenting forgiveness.

“While we are able to do so, let us note the distinction. A park is a managerial unit definable in quantitative and pragmatic terms. Wilderness is unquantifiable. Its boundaries are vague or nonexistent, its contents unknown, its inhabitants elusive. The purpose of parks is use; the earmark of wilderness is mystery. Because they serve technology, parks tend toward the predictable and static, but wilderness is infinitely burgeoning and changing because it is the matrix of life itself. When we create parks we bow to increased bureaucracy and surveillance, but when we speak for wilderness we recognize our right to fewer strictures and greater freedom. Regulated and crowded, parks will eventually fragment us, as they fragment the wilderness which makes us whole.”
– Wayland Drew

The word “wilderness” is likely to evoke about a million different thoughts and images. Everyone’s got a slightly different version, either experienced first-hand, or dreamed up in some corner of their imagination. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced true wilderness, the kind of wild space that makes you forget there’s an alternative. At this point it feels almost impossible, a living environment that’s unknowable and borderless, one that edges on dangerous, or that we haven’t even touched or taken it upon ourselves to maintain.

Wilderness has become a popular word lately. It features in many trending hashtags and hangs on the pages of blog posts and well designed quarterly magazines. It pops up in print and digital advertisements and beckons from within high budget SUV and credit card commercials. It’s a bit of everywhere, but it’s still something very few of us experience. The mystery and inaccessibility may hold our imagination, and we may be inspired to hike out in search of our own brush with wilderness, but where are we actually going when we head into the wild?

In the United States, 80% of us live in urban environments. That’s a huge number of people who likely have more experiences with the outdoors via Google Image Search than they do in real life. We’re deeply separated from nature, both physically and psychologically. The distance grows greater every day as cities expand up and out. Everyday, concrete and steel facades reach higher heights and spread farther into formerly natural areas. We’re constantly encroaching on and compromising spaces that are necessary for plant and animal populations, and are therefore systematically reducing the portion of Earth that is truly “wild.” To bridge the gap, technology has advanced to allow us to take virtual tours of national parks and nature preserves. The distance between us and a backcountry hike is equal to the amount of time it takes us to search a tag on Instagram.

But we all know the digital experience isn’t enough. Looking at a photograph of a mountainside at dusk — no matter how beautiful or perfectly composed — doesn’t even come close to standing there in real time, inhaling the scent of junegrass and listening to the buzz and chatter of the creatures around you. So we seek out the wilderness. We seek to immerse ourselves in it. Millions of us, and more every year, drive, fly, hike, ski, and climb to the places we picture when we close our eyes and imagine “quiet.”

Maybe true wilderness doesn’t exist anymore; the kind that’s dark and deep and lonely and frightening because you don’t know if you’ll make it back and even more so because you don’t know who you’ll be once you get there. Or maybe wilderness is whatever place that brings us closest to that type of experience. Maybe it’s the place where we have enough space and time to ourselves that we can look both outward and inward with equal amounts of terror and courage.

It seems that wilderness isn’t a specific number of feet away from the trail, or a quota on the number of other people who have accessed a protected area. Wilderness is what you make it. It’s somewhere distant and remote, and it can also be the local park down the street. It’s somewhere that expands your understanding of nature and your place in it. It’s somewhere that makes you question yourself. It’s somewhere that makes you whole.