Lessons from a parsley plant

Biomimicry and what nature has to teach us

I bought one of those little herb plants at the Fresh Market in Louisville a couple of weeks ago. A flat leaf parsley plant that had probably never seen the world outside a greenhouse or its spot in the produce aisle between the avocados and the onions. But it’s mid-April and a warm one, so I stuck the parsley plant in the ground in one of our raised beds.

At first, the plant did not look too happy about this situation. It was used to a more temperate climate inside the Fresh Market—a controlled and predictable world. The leaves turned yellow and drooped onto the ground. A failed gardening experiment, perhaps. The real world too wild for this indoor creature.

Then yesterday, I leaned over and studied the plant up close. At first glance, it still looked pretty sad. But in the middle of the plant—new leaves poking up. A dark green climbing into the light. A wonder. A persistence. An unfathomable gift. The parsley plant has decided to live.

In another corner of the garden, the raspberry canes I thought my husband had killed in a fit of exuberant weeding are just fine, thank you. Being cut all the way back to the ground is exactly what they needed, after all. How does that work? Cut us down and we come back stronger.

One miracle after another all around our tiny garden. The burning bush that appears to be dead except for the tiny, pink sprout of life emerging from a branch. The lettuce and winter greens I planted back in March ready to be thrown into a salad. The iris blooms that were closed in the morning and open by afternoon, a slow-motion magic trick. Even the poison ivy I tried so hard to kill with a tarp to starve it of light all last summer—still alive. A three-leaved, ‘fuck you’ to any illusions I might have about being in charge out here in the green world.

Sometimes you have to look very, very close for signs that the world is still growing and changing and surviving

Any gardener worth their salt knows this—we humans are not in charge. We don’t run the show. We can try to. But the potato bugs or the flea beetles or raccoons or the rain or the lack of rain or the poison ivy will soon disabuse us of any such notion.

I listened to a podcast this week—an interview with the mother of biomimicry, Janine Benyus. Biomimicry is the conscious emulation of life’s genius, a practice in which engineers and designers and innovators start with the question, “How has nature solved this problem?” Benyus had lots of fascinating things to say, like that perhaps the ‘discovery’ of fire by humans is sort of, well, overrated. We learned how to burn things. Wood and then coal and then oil—all limited resources. How has that turned out for us? Nature is by and large solar-powered, which is a pretty efficient way of making things and fueling life for everything on the planet but, well, humans.

Benyus also talks about treating nature as a colleague or a mentor and I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea. As she points out, once we use the language of nature as a ‘resource,’ we’ve already made certain assumptions. We’re already locked in one type of relationship, where nature exists in order to provide for us. But let’s be real, the poison ivy doesn’t give a fuck about me one way or the other.

But if nature—including the poison ivy—is a collaborator, what does that mean for how we interact with it? What can I learn from the poison ivy and the parsley plant and the raspberry canes? Persistence. Adaptability. That sometimes you might have to be cut down in order to come back strong.

Also these last few weeks, I’ve watched one beautiful old tree after another around town get chopped down. I don’t know why these trees are being removed. Often it’s about the sidewalks. The tree’s roots push the sidewalk up and that’s a hazard and an inconvenience. The tree has to go.

Think on that for a moment. This tree, older than most of the people cutting it down, inconveniences us. It isn’t useful. Not a resource. Forget that the tree provides shade in the hottest months of the summer. That it shelters squirrels and birds and insects. That, increasingly, we’re coming to understand trees and plants as beings who communicate and cooperate. Forget that we could not survive on this planet without trees and other plants, who allow us to do that fairly important thing called breathing. Forget all of that. You have to in order to cut the tree down.

Instead, imagine for a moment that the tree isn’t a resource or a nuisance. Imagine it is your colleague. Your mentor. Now maybe you’d like to cut your colleagues down sometimes, though I hope you wouldn’t go that far. I hope you’d remember that your colleagues are in it together with you. Creating something. Teaching and learning from each other. Engaged in that highest of callings—figuring shit out together. Is the quality of the sidewalks more important than that?

This idea of learning from our non-human family isn’t new, of course. That the plants and the animals and the mountains and the rain are collaborators with us is a very old idea. An old idea that’s worth bringing back. An idea that suggests even the poison ivy has something important to say, if we just stop trying to kill everything long enough to listen.

What lesson is there in that parsley plant? It began its life as part of the system of industrial agriculture somewhere. A corporate creature. But given the opportunity to start a new path, it took it. Weathered the transition, even though it was shaky at times. Put out new growth. Became something else. If the parsley plant can do all that, maybe we can, too.