“Plants are integral to reweaving the connection between land and people. A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit. To recreate a home, the plants must also return.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer
It was a few weeks ago that I was out foraging for Nettle Seeds. Didn’t know where I would find them, since we moved to the other side of the city a year ago. I was 9 months pregnant then, and baby Bastian was born just a few weeks later as last year’s Nettle seeds became green and plump, then brown, and then gone.
On the other side of Stockholm, I would know exactly where to find the best stinging nettles. But on this side? I wasn’t sure.
I set out with my basket and garden scissors, my feet heading toward the big protected forest that’s about half an hour away. One step after another, until I was standing underneath old Pines and Spruces, admiring the Heather flowering all over the forest floor. It was then that I realized that the heather I’d foraged a couple of weeks earlier in the archipelago had not been ready yet. There had a few flowers on them, but nothing like these heather there, bursting and heavy with purple and white and pink and green.
I felt so sorry to those heather branches hanging in my studio. Though I’d only snapped a few of them off, I’d ripped them from their home, hung them up to dry, and for what? I will return them, I decided. Even though they are dead now, at least I can return them to their place in the world. It’s the least I can do.
“No, no,” I believe I heard, “Honor their lives.”
But how?
[Later, some research would lead me away from the idea that Heather was only good for its flowers. It’s branches and roots are very useful as well, particularly for basketweaving, for making brushes and brooms, as comfortable mattress stuffings, thatching, and more. And since I’m presently entrenched in the art of basketweaving, I am so excited to see how I might be able to incorporate the sweet-smelling heather branches into my practice. ]
As Robin Wall Kimmerer said in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass – as a human, by my very animal nature, I must take from the world in order to live. Unlike plants, I cannot photosynthesize. I cannot be the practical physical food and medicine stuff that they are. I cannot spend my life in one spot, deeply rooted into the soil, in total silence, pollinating the world. And because the wisdom of plants has become a lost language to my species, I must learn everything, with some help from them of course.
I peered down at the Heather, thanked them for the lesson. Next year I will know better.
Will anyone else stop to admire your flowers this year? I wondered. And yet even if I had not come, you would have bloomed anyway. “Yes,” I heard back, “And anyway, they all see.”
Until that moment, I nearly forgot that I was standing in the midst of a vast ancient world. I could be an inhabitant, but I’m not anymore. Just a visitor now trying to find my way back into some sort of relationship with all of these non-peopled beings. I don’t even know all of their names. At first glance, things that were visible in the moment: Alder, Pine, Silver Birch, Spruce, Fir, Blueberry, Heather, Moss, Black Oak, Dragonfly, Earthworm, Rowan, Fern, Ground Elder, Burdock, Rose, Spider, Birds I could hear but not see. Plus so many more I do not know.
And they’re all “sovereign beings,” as Kimmerer says in her TEDx talk Reclaiming the Honorable Harvest. “With their own intelligences. Their own wisdom. Their own responsibilities.”
We’ve begun to discuss moving outside of the city. Over the years we’ve been creeping further and further out, but we’re still in the suburbs of Stockholm. Where big, expansive highways are always humming. Where there are big box stores, big shopping malls and parking lots. Where there should be thick forests and rolling fields, there is just so much concrete. I think I’d feel more at peace in the city where at least the concrete was better utilized. And yet every time I go into the city, I cannot wait to get out of it. Stockholm has changed so much in the 12 years we’ve lived here. Or perhaps it is we who have changed so much.
So we are considering selling our city home, but now we face a huge question: where do we go?
Neither my Spanish partner nor I have any family here. Our 12 years in Sweden have all been in Stockholm. We were married here. Our children were born here. I know every part of this city by heart – and not the main streets, but all the unmarked paths and shortcuts. I’ve walked around these 14 islands thousands of times. I know where the best Elder trees grow, the best Dandelions, the best Yarrow and Rosehips…
And there they were – stopping me dead in my tracks – an enormous patch of Stinging Nettles growing at the bottom of a hillside. They were about a meter tall and heavy with seed pods. Stretching above them, covering the hillside, were wild Blueberry bushes. Two plants that I never really knew until I moved to Sweden, but oh my how I know them now. I’ve spent countless hours collecting them from the forest, cleaning and preserving them at home, using them throughout the year.
There are many other plants I now know, but these two have been there from day one. They’ve caught a lot of my tears, heard a lot of my joys and stories and laughter, they know my kids and are spoken of in our home as friends. They’ve nourished our bodies, of course, but they welcomed us to this land and showed us around long before the human people did. They’ve taught me a lot about the others in the forest too.
In fact, I realized, Stockholm has become home to me BECAUSE of the natural world I’ve come to know – not because of the cafes or shops. It’s the Swedish nature I miss when I’m away. It’s true that I’ve become a citizen of this country, but that’s not at all what makes it a home. Becoming naturalized to this land is what has made it deeply and truly home.
So the question that’s been constantly on my mind – where do we go? where is our place? – I found an answer on this day. “Wherever you go, we are there,” whispered the Blueberries and Nettles. And what a relief that was to hear. Though it didn’t answer my question in a practical sense, it did assure me that I can be at home as long as there are Blueberries to pick, Nettles to harvest.
But let’s talk about harvesting.
What is Sustainable Harvesting?
I love how Robin Wall Kimmerer describes harvesting as “honorable” rather than sustainable.
‘Sustainable’ has become a commercial term, and the boundaries of its meaning are very fuzzy. For most companies, and certainly corporations, the term sustainable is all about controlled environments, monocropping, incubators and other measures to protect their profit and cover up the damage. Most of the work is outsourced, so the owners of a brand, even a natural and sustainable one, have little connection to the actual raw materials of nature, little connection to the plants or even the place.
But honorable – wow.
We know what honorable means. It’s not a matter of mechanics, but of morals. To harvest honorably. To be respectful, just as we are in our relationships. To conceive of others on this planet as family, friends.
How we think about our relationship to the natural world matters deeply. It is our moral imagination that will shape our futures, as much as any technology or policy.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Reclaiming the Honorable Harvest
I use plants for so many things, beyond just Wyld products. They’re a big part of our everyday home and family life:
- In body and skincare products
- In cleaning products
- As basketmaking materials
- To make brooms and brushes with
- To make string (or cordage as it’s often called)
- As natural dyes and pigments
- Of course as edible things, nutrition.
- For medicine
- In vases and pots around our home
- Or other plant and fiber art for the sake of their simple beauty
There is nothing inherently wrong about harvesting materials from nature. As I said above, we really have no choice as humans but to be consumers. That is our place – and our responsibility. In fact, with the right guiding principles, we can actually become important for its health and survival too.
I’ve started reading a phenomenal book called Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson. I won’t be able to do it much justice now, but I can already promise that it will be joining the Wyld Library very soon.
But basically, when white settlers arrived on the western coast of America (California), they saw a vast, rich land of thriving plants and animals. To their untrained eyes, this land appeared to be totally wild. And the indigenous people of California appeared to be living lazily off of this wildly abundant, incredibly bountiful land. The people seemed to have no purpose in life, an idle, indolent cultures who were mere occupants of this pristine place.
Little did these settlers know that the land they were looking at was anything but wild. The native people had played and were playing an enormous role in their environment’s health, not through idleness but through constant, deliberate labor and love.
Through coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning, and selective harvesting, they encouraged desired characteristics of individual plants, increased populations of useful plants, and altered the structures and compositions of plant communities. Regular burning of many types of vegetation across the state created better habitat for game, eliminated brush, minimized potential for catastrophic fires, and encouraged diversity of food crops. These harvest and management practices, on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries and possibly thousands of years.
From Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson
Meanwhile, John Muir was working on his grandiose writings about the wild, wild west. He was praised for his scientific acuity and protection of the wild. And yet he didn’t even understand that what he was looking at was not wild, untouched nature – it was a well-tended garden by a culture of people who were being removed from their homelands, enduring unspeakable horrors that are still hardly understood today – far worse than even I imagined. I had to put this book down a few times and just weep.
This book, Tending the Wild, is challenging everything I believed. It is making me question what is truly “wild” and why I would call any plant or animal “wild” at all. In the words of a Chukchansi woman, Clara Jones Sargosa:
I’ve always wondered why people call plants ‘wild.’ We don’t think of them that way. They just come up wherever they are, and like us, they are at home in that place.
Clara Jones Sargosa, Chukchansi (1990) in Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson
So how did the indigenous people do it, then? How did they come to know the animals so intimately, even potentially dangerous animals, and live so harmoniously with them? How did they learn when to harvest certain plants for maximum benefits?
How did the coastal Pomo people figure out that, to avoid a toxic chemical in Shellfish, they should stop gathering clams and mussels as soon as the Elderberry shrubs flowered – and then when there ripe Elderberries on the shrubs, they could safely begin to harvest the Shellfish again?
How did the Hupa people figure out that, to make the best twine and strongest ropes, they should harvest Mesteelen leaves from plants growing under Oak trees rather than under Pines?
For them, Nature was fully alive and sensate – with innate authority and wisdom.
And although native ways of using and tending the earth were diverse, the people were nonetheless unified by a fundamental land use ethic: one must interact respectfully with nature and coexist with all life-forms. The spiritual dimension of this ethic is a cosmology that casts humans as part of the natural system, closely related to all life-forms. In this view, all non-human creatures are “kin” or “relatives,” nature is the embodiment of the human community, and all of nature’s denizens and elements – the plants, the animals, the rocks, the water – are people.
As ‘people,’ they possessed intelligence, which meant that they could serve in the role of teachers and help humans in countless ways – relaying messages, forecasting the weather, teaching what is good to eat and what will cure an ailment.
Again I am not even scratching the surface of what this book, but I am still holding onto the principles of the Honorable Harvest that I learned some years ago from Robin Wall Kimmerer, doing my best everyday to live them out.
What are they, exactly?
The Honorable Harvest
The guidelines for the Honorable Harvest are not written down, or even consistently spoken of as a whole- they are reinforced in small acts of daily life. But if you were to list them, they might look something like this:
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
<3
Related Reading
Wyld Reads: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer – if you want to learn even more about the amazing book mentioned in this story.
Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson is also now in the Wyld Library!
Make Your Own Nettle Seed Salt – 5 blends for your tasting pleasure!
Why We Wildcraft and Handcraft – what keeps our head and heart fully in this work.
Swedish summer and harvesting postpartum care plants – this one is a little video, actually, of some weeks ago as I harvested some plants for friends on the brink of childbirth. I need to share what I’ve created with these plants so far!
Being in Wild Places – or maybe they aren’t wild, based on what I’m learning. Simply being in Nature, perhaps, or being at Home.
xx
