The pleasure and the pleasure

Gardening as mutual aid, poison oak as teacher, a new community for Forum

Perhaps the most glorious thing about revving the engine on the Oakland Garden Club is that now everyone tells me about the best plant stuff. And then I can share those things with you all. Community, man. Today, I bring you Pleasure Herbal: Growing Herbs in Coastal California by Wes Holtermann, which Samin Nosrat tipped me off to. And via Nicola Twiley, I read The Pleasure: Animist Encounters with Poison Oak by Erik Davis. Both are in the beautiful tradition of tiny, strange plant books that are really about how to see the world (and love).

But first! I bring news from the internet.

I’ve long held a dream of creating a different, better place to spend time in digital space. Social media, as we’ve known it, has generally failed to provide the tools and social patterns necessary. But I saw a productive, supportive digital community take shape around the COVID Tracking Project, and it was meaningful (and astonishing). Everyone should be able to have a place like that to go on the internet. So: today, KQED is launching a digital community for the Bay Area and beyond. We’re trying to create a space like Forum does on the airwaves: ideas-y, diverse, conversational, respectful, fun, civic minded. You should join! I need more plant nerds in there for me. We’re organizing on Discord, which can feel a little disconcerting because it’s so much like Slack but also a little bit different. Give it a chance. Email me if you’ve got questions. Let’s make our place!

I now return you to plants.

Pleasure Herbal is a zine by the poet and actual gardener Wes Holtermann. It has real and practical advice about growing thyme (“nutrient-poor, sharp-draining soil” only) and chives (tuck them into shady spots—they can take it) and other plants, too.

But it is actually worth reading for the sentences. For example, on cilantro. “A lot of fuss is made over how to keep cilantro from bolting,” he writes, “but I relish the featheriness the bolting leaves take on, and the blooms, umbels of blushing white, add a billowy softness to the garden.” Beautiful. (I’ll add: I toss the cilantro blooms in bouquets of flowers from my garden. They are often just the thing to make an arrangement of homegrown flowers feel full, but still delicate.)

A poet’s compression is just as evident in his manifesto about gardening. (Can you tell I am jealous?) In two pages, Holtermann makes a case for a whole philosophy, even a way of being.

“There is nothing so luxurious as an abundant herb garden,” he writes. “I want herbs to be plentiful enough that I can harvest them without guilt. Gardening should be about sustenance and community, a wealth of aroma and nectar and bitter greens. An arena of pleasure.”

All right, Wes, I’m listening. But how to get there?

“Every herb included provides habitat and food for pollinators, birds, and other wildlife, although you’ll have to let them flower and in many cases go to seed to make use of their full benefits,” Holtermann continues. “This may be counterintuitive to the principles by which a lot of us learned to garden, many of which are ultimately influenced by colonial capitalism, and the notion that to garden well, we have to triumph over nature. In reality, there’s no distinction between us and nature.”

I love the idea of creating a garden not just for you, but for all these other creatures. Not just planting milkweed to help the one charismatic butterfly species (beautiful though it is), but considering the whole plot, however big or small, as a mixed-species “place of sanctuary, nourishment, and pleasure.”

Holtermann knows there is more to the ecological crisis than a garden can solve, of course. But he conceives of the garden within the tradition of mutual aid (just for other species), survival pending revolution. Finally, the blockquote we’ve all been waiting for:

As gardeners, even those of us with no property, growing plants in buckets in whatever scraps of sunlight we can find, we have an opportunity to help heal the land and to provide vital food and shelter. One dill plant can provide a nursery for Anise Swallowtail butterflies. The flower of an artichoke left to ossify in winter becomes a home for insects. The fluff of its seeds, down for a songbird’s nest. A single aster can be a featherbed for a group of male longhorn bees, who at night curl tenderly into one another like cats in the center of a flower. A garden can feel like a drop in the bucket in a crumbling world, but for those who make use of it, it’s everything.

You can buy the book direct from Holtermann. And you should. You want this book in your plant library.¹

Erik Davis approaches pleasure from a different direction, which is to say pain. This wonderful essay is carried along by Davis’s vivacious narrator, who delightfully and blamelessly describes the realities of poison oak. “But enough of science, let us speak of pain—or rather of the pleasure, which is what one rural couple I know call the oak attacks that continue to vex them despite years of removal efforts,” Davis writes. “The pleasure is a singular suffering.”

What follows is an prodigious list of symptoms and sensations (“a bouquet of pains,” “an almost sci-fi range of body horrors”) followed by the one form of relief that Davis experiences during these attacks: hot showers and baths. “Performing what your fingernails dare not, the hot water drives the feedback loop of itching and scratching into an orgasmic, almost sadomasochistic rush that I can feel all the way down to my toes.” It is Lacanian jouissance, “enjoyment taken beyond the pleasure principle, a painful but attractive excess that transgresses the boundaries that normally regulate our kicks.” This pleasure is not the pleasure of fat bumblebees and seed pods, of dewy grass and the sweet aromas of green herbs.

But it is not Davis’s point (or only point, at least) to glory in detailing the oak’s punishments. Rather, he wants to point out that our (certainly, my) interest in “plant teachers” cannot only see the fun, pretty plants as good teachers. “What would it mean to see T. diversilobum as a plant teacher?” he asks. “[T]he real teachings lie in the qualities of relationship that the plant demands. These include attention, knowledge, intuition, and respect, and they are driven into you whether or not you fancy yourself an animist or a plant person.”

Even just as a presence in the landscape, T. diversilobum, offers us humility: Nope, can’t go there. Davis notes that some California plant people call it guardian oak because it scares us off and “maintains space for other-than-human-beings.” As Davis friend Fletcher Tucker says: “Maybe you don’t get to scramble down that hillside or jump into that pool. Just stop for a second and look at the beautiful view. Maybe that’s all you get.” A profound lesson—not every part of the world is for you, even if you want it.²

And just curious: I have never had a bodily encounter with poison/guardian oak (makes sign of cross, throws salt over shoulder). If it’s taught you something, can you tell us about it?

Cuttings

• A wonderful Chronicle column on this one oak tree in Oakland. It’s mostly about the systems surrounding the tree and the big gaps in history that exist around so much of the more-than-human world. But there’s more, too: “In the end, I found out a lot about oak trees, but little about the one I walk by every day. Spending time with this tree, here’s what I’ve learned: There’s a large crow’s nest in its branches. Baby acorns are just starting to sprout. Its bark stays cool on hot days.”
  + Thanks, Robin Sloan, for sending!

• Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as mouse cress, is the model plant. Heady stuff for a fairly random weed with no horticultural value. So, how did Arabidopsis become a model organism? Philosopher and historian of science Sabina Leonelli fills us in beautifully.

• You ever look at those beautiful botanical and anatomical drawings from long ago and wonder why they were made? Sachiko Kusukawa’s Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument offers something of an answer. As Daniel Brownstein’s review puts it: “Kusukawa reveals how images served as proxies for opening, separating, and examining natural forms and how they collectively provided a new understanding of ‘nature.’” Pretty fascinating both as plant history and media history. After all, at this time, the reproduction of images was … new. What could do it for science? Bonus thought: Have you noticed how bad AI is at reproducing the details of botanical structures? Take a look. The flowers might look fine, but the leaves don’t match, etc.

• You ever wanted to read a deep history on (the sociotechnical infrastructure of) the naming of pepper varietals? I know, me too. Here’s your chance: “Cropping synonymy: varietal standardization in the United States, 1900–1970”

1. It’s worth mentioning a couple credits, too: The cover painting is by Michael Assiff, whose work is phenomenal. The cover design is by Fin Simonetti, whose work I found disturbing and interesting.

2. One production note on this book: it is published by Fiddler’s Green, a delightfully weird Berkeley thing helmed by one Clint Marsh. They also publish a zine, Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine. “In ecclesiastical terms, the word ‘peculiar’ refers to a district outside the jurisdiction of the Church. It’s also a good word for describing my own view of reality, and likely yours as well,” Marsh writes. “And so here is a ‘peculiar parish magazine’ for anyone who doesn’t feel the need to have their inner life directed by others. If it is peculiar that we wish to govern our bodies and souls ourselves, then let us be peculiar.” Indeed.