Plants as Portals
Field Notes from Tessellations
‘Our tiny patch of native geography seemed, to my child’s eye, vast.’
— Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive.
‘Whatever happened, the place we lived became unliveable. It’s the central problem of being human.’
— Mohsin Hamid in conversation with the MCW class of 2022 over zoom.
‘So. It wasn’t over. The past could come back, fully formed, at any moment, unlocked by a random combination of sounds and movements. … For the rest of the day I was so exhausted I could barely move, as if all my energy had been used up in a single second. Eventually I told Harris about the flashback and this was like pouring a cup of water down the drain, no comfort whatsoever. Which wasn’t his fault — imagine every person who has ever greeted a time traveller upon their return home. There’s no way to ask the right questions, being so filled with a belief in the present. What did the horses smell like? That would be a good question.’
— Miranda July All Fours
As children we are close to the ground, roaming, absorbing the landscape into our small bodies. For the first eleven years of my life, I lived in the United States. I ‘know’ the country the way any child knows a country: by its ecology.
I knew well the teeming undergrowth, the private hollows under shrubs and in the crooks of trees. I knew the creatures whose lives intersected with our own: bats, squirrels and chipmunks, birds, cicadas, the streams of ants marching in and out of the stand of peonies on the northern perimeter. Frogs and toads, once a tiny, hairless possum, and the soft, warm bodies of our dogs and cats. The shaggy and stout Icelandic horses I learned to ride on, the Angora goats my family raised, the fox and garter snakes, the barn mice, the water snakes and carp that crowded the boat ramp where I liked to play while my parents ate long lunches at the Sailor’s Pub, and the leeches I sometimes came home with on my feet, hours before I noticed them, fat and full of blood. The corn and bean fields and stands of wildflowers. Lake Michigan going on forever. The world seemed to spill out endlessly from the boundaries of our yard.
Like a move across the Pacific, memory dislocates. My memories of that country are more vivid for our having left, and being away, one finds trapdoors and portals everywhere. A sundial set in a side garden will spill me into the dream of my childhood like homemade lemonade poured from a pitcher, ice tinkling against the glass.
Plants are easy portals to memory, to the landscapes of our childhood lying dormant in our bodies. A stem snipped with a sharp nail, lifted to the nose, carried in a clammy palm or a back pocket, dried and saved or burned. The smell and colour fade to a hull, a husk, a shell, a case, a stand-in for something once alive. The years drift off like planets in outer orbit, unreachable, seen through a telescope if one has the right equipment. But an untouched memory arriving from deep within the psyche is not like a distant planet. For a moment, it is the planet we live on now, as real and alive as the moment we lived it.
A plant is a portal, a window, a wormhole. To a locust tree and a library, to an empty room filled with light.
The memories unlock, tumble forth, gather. Time and place fold. The body, in two places at once, wavers.
Daucus carota
Daucus carota
Bromus catharticus
Briza minor
Polypogon monspeciensis