How to Make a Plant Love You: Cultivate Green Space in Your Home and Heart

OPTIMISM PRESS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 2019 by Summer Rayne Oakes

Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Mark Conlan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Oakes, Summer Rayne, author.

Title: How to make a plant love you : cultivate green space in your home and heart / Summer Rayne Oakes ; illustrations by Mark Conlan.

Description: New York City : Optimism Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019010935 (print) | LCCN 2019015413 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525540298 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525540281 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: House plants. | Gardening—Health aspects. | Gardening—Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC SB419 (ebook) | LCC SB419 .O25 2019 (print) | DDC 635.9/65—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010935

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

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To the plants: my teachers, my partners, and my compatriots, for I have learned so much from you over the years.

and

To all the Crazy Plant People out there who have ever fallen in love with a plant.

May you go forth and sow your homes and the earth with green.

  CONTENTS  

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

A LETTER FROM SIMON SINEK

FOREWORD BY WADE DAVIS

A NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

The Mass Migration

CHAPTER 2

Our Need for Nature

CHAPTER 3

We Only Love What We Notice

CHAPTER 4

When a Tree Falls in the Forest . . .

CHAPTER 5

A Human History of Houseplants

CHAPTER 6

Getting to Know Your Plants

CHAPTER 7

How to Make a Plant Love You

CHAPTER 8

Cultivating Your Personal Green Space

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

RESOURCES

NOTES

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A LETTER FROM SIMON SINEK

The vision is clear: to build a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe at work, and return home fulfilled at the end of the day. I believe the best way to build the world I imagine is with leaders. Good leaders. Great leaders. And so, I’ve devoted my professional life to finding, building, and supporting the leaders who are committed to leading in a way that will more likely bring that vision to life.

Unfortunately, the practice of leadership is so misunderstood. It has nothing to do with rank. It has nothing to do with authority. Those things may come with a leadership position—and they may help a leader operate with greater efficiency and at greater scale—but those things do not a leader make. Leadership is not about being in charge; it’s about taking care of those in our charge. It is a distinctly human endeavor. And part of what it takes to advance good leadership is to share the lessons, tools, and ideas that help each of us become the leaders we wish we had. How to Make a Plant Love You is one of those ideas.

I fell in love with this concept because, at its core, How to Make a Plant Love You is a metaphor for how we view, and often treat, people. It is a direct but gentle reminder to consider how much the environment around us matters. Think about how we usually treat the plants in our homes: we find one we like, we place it in a room where we want it to go, where we think it looks best, and then we expect it to thrive. That strategy, unfortunately, only increases the chances that the plant will struggle or die. We first have to understand the plant in order to create the conditions for it to thrive—the same is true for people.

Too often, we find someone whose experience fits a job we need done. We put them in that job, in a space, and expect them to thrive. Unfortunately, such a strategy also increases the likelihood that someone will struggle to do well, or fail to work to their natural best. But there is a solution.

For some, How to Make a Plant Love You is a book about how we care for and treat our plants. However, if we embrace the underlying philosophies, we will find valuable life lessons that will teach us how to better care for and treat people—starting with ourselves. Summer Rayne takes us on a journey to show us how the environment we set significantly impacts the life and lives around us. If we can learn to ask what a plant needs from us, and not what we need from a plant, we will also learn how to ask that same question of people. This shift in mind-set is what servant leadership is all about. And if we can all learn to make that shift, it’s amazing how alive our spaces, our communities, and our lives can be.

Happy planting and inspire on!

FOREWORD BY WADE DAVIS

This book is a love story that invites everyone to embrace the wonder of the botanical realm—all the glorious species of orchids and begonias, aroids and fuchsias, the delicate ferns and otherworldly bromeliads that flourish in the wild and can so readily be brought into our homes and lives. In sharing how plants transformed her life, Summer Rayne Oakes offers a practical guide that will allow you to discover, as she did, a relationship that is both rewarding and revelatory.

As Summer Rayne shares her delightful journey—one that led a peripatetic eco-activist and global fashion model to become a home-based, plant-inspired, urban apartment–dwelling horticultural guru—she confronts us with a fundamental paradox: we all love nature. Plants account for 80 percent of the world’s biomass, yet most of us know almost nothing about botany. We may be familiar with hundreds of commercial brands, yet incapable of naming a single species of flowering plant.

Plants are the foundation of all sentient existence. The miracle of photosynthesis allows green leaves to harness the energy of the sun, producing food and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, without which none of us could live. Children in all nations are encouraged to recite patriotic slogans, lines of verse, prayers, and popular ditties, yet not one in a million is asked to commit to the fundamental formula of life: the metabolic pathway by which carbon dioxide and water, sparked by photons of light, is transformed into carbohydrates and oxygen.

I say this not in judgement, for I too was raised blithely unaware of the deep significance of plants. Like Summer Rayne, I grew up with a keen appreciation of nature, and spent all of my waking hours exploring the forests and mountains of home. And though I would eventually earn a PhD in biology with a specialty in ethnobotany, I never took a course in botany until my third year of university. In my youth, and certainly through high school, I associated academic biology with formaldehyde, pickled rats, and white-frocked technicians in laboratory classrooms that smelled of chemicals. Only in time would I discover that while some biology teachers may indeed be boring, plants never are, and the study of botany is actually a window that opens wide to reveal the sacred essence of life itself.

At twenty, I first experienced the overwhelming grandeur of the Amazon rain forest. It is a subtle thing. There are few flowers to be seen, and certainly no cascades of orchids—just a thousand shades of green; an infinitude of shape, form, and texture. To sit in silence is to hear the constant hum of biological activity—evolution, if you will, working in overdrive. From the edge of trails creepers lash at the base of trees, and herbaceous heliconias and calatheas give way to broad-leaf aroids that climb into the shadows. Overhead, lianas drape from immense trees binding the canopy of the forest into a single interwoven fabric of life.

At first, knowing little of plants, I experienced the tropical forest only as a tangle of forms, shapes, and colors without meaning or depth; beautiful when taken as a whole but ultimately incomprehensible and exotic. But once viewed through the botanical lens, the components of the mosaic suddenly had names, the names implied relationships, and the relationships resonated with significance. This, for me, was the great revelation of botany.

My partner on this journey of discovery was the late Timothy Plowman, the protégé of the legendary Amazonian plant explorer, Richard Evans Schultes. In the mid-1970s, on a journey inspired by our great professor (made possible by his generosity and infused at all times with his spirit), Tim and I traveled the length of South America, traversing the Andes to reach the cloud forests and remote drainages that fell away into the Amazon. Tim was an inspired mentor, a dear friend, and a brilliant botanist—one of the very few capable of realigning taxonomic classifications simply by holding a blossom to the light.

Even as Tim and I worked our way south, collecting several thousand herbarium specimens along with great quantities of live material destined for the botanical gardens of the world, a book appeared that made a great fuss about houseplants responding to music and human voices. Tim found the entire notion slightly ridiculous. Why would a plant give a shit about Mozart? he asked. "And even if it did, why should that impress us? I mean, they can eat light. Isn’t that enough?"

Tim went on to speak of photosynthesis the way an artist might describe color. He said that at dusk the process is reversed and plants actually emit small amounts of light. He referred to sap as the green blood of plants, explaining that chlorophyll is structurally almost the same as the pigment of our blood, only the iron in hemoglobin is replaced by magnesium in plants. He spoke of the way plants grow: a seed of grass producing sixty miles (96.6 kilometers)of root hairs in a day, 6,000 miles (9,656 kilometers) over the course of a season; a field of hay exhaling 500 tons of water into the air each day; a flower pushing its blossom through three inches of pavement; a single catkin of a birch tree producing 5 million grains of pollen; a tree living for 4,000 years. The trunk of a western hemlock, a miracle of biological engineering, stores thousands of gallons of water and supports branches festooned with as many as 70 million needles, all capturing the light of the sun. Spread out on the ground, the needles of a single tree would create a photosynthetic surface ten times the size of a football field.

Unlike every other botanist I had known, Tim was not obsessed with classification. For him Latin names were like koans or lines of verse. He remembered them effortlessly, taking particular delight in their origins. When you say the names of the plants, he told me, you say the names of the gods.

Among our many botanical discoveries during those long months of fieldwork were a number of new hallucinogens, uncovered through an ongoing series of self-experiments. Professor Schultes once quipped that Tim and I ate our way through the forests and hedgerows of the Andes and upper Amazon. In the wake of one of these curious sessions, I was inspired to share a revelation with our beloved yet famously conservative professor. On a bit of cardboard found discarded in the desert, I sketched a simple line that I intended to later dispatch to Harvard by telegram. Dear Professor Schultes, the note read. We are all ambulatory plants. Tim urged caution, and mercifully the message was never sent.

Inauspicious as such a missive may have been in the moment, it nevertheless conveyed essential truths. Life emerged from the sea. Animals went walking. Plants rooted themselves to place. Animals developed organs that concentrated all the functions essential to survival. Plants, by contrast, dispersed these functions throughout the entire organism, employing the entire body to breathe and create food through the processes of respiration and photosynthesis. Plants did not evolve brains because such a decentralized structure of production did not require one. Every green surface generates food. The wonder of plants, as Tim would say, is not the possibility that they respond to Mozart, Beethoven, or the Beatles, but rather in how they actually exist. To suggest that they communicate with the human sphere on our terms is a conceit that reveals, as much as anything, a failure to appreciate what plants as living organisms have actually achieved over millions of years of intense evolutionary pressure and competition.

This should not suggest for a moment that science has revealed all there is to know about the botanical realm. As Summer Rayne writes in this marvelous book, plants continue to amaze, displaying capacities difficult to explain, capabilities that defy the limits of our imaginings. Take, for example, the common Mimosa pudica, a ground cover known to many as the sensitive plant. Touch the leaves and they fold defensively, only slowly regaining their normal display with photosynthetic surfaces fully exposed to the sun. But do this several times to the same plant and it will, at some point, no longer respond to tactile stimuli. One can only conclude that in some idiosyncratic plant way, it no longer