Reclaiming a Relationship with Plants

A thought exercise in plant literacy

The telial horns of juniper rust fungus on a (you guessed it!) a juniper bush in Mt. Haggin WMA.

I have always tended to bypass looking at what was rooted for what was moving through. My neurodynamic brain tends to sparkle when things are moving, lights up when I see a flash of an ear over the grass or a tine of an antler in the timber. It’s not really surprising to me that I became a hunter; I am wired for it.

I tracked animals growing up in rural Ohio, pocketing snakes and baby robins. Sometimes, I’d slowly follow the trail of a whitetail buck through the neighboring pockets of woods. In that place, I was closer to plants than any point in my life.

We were free to roam on that big farm landscape. The neighborhood kids would climb the mulberry tree off the covered bridge, and then we’d go home stained bright magenta. We’d pluck apples off apple trees in the fall, and we’d eat strawberries from a small hill with a shaded garden. I’d twist a sun-warmed tomato right off the vine and eat it in huge hungry bites, the juice dripping down the front of my shirt. Of course, we weren’t supposed to be doing these things, but we did anyway. Growing up on a 200-acre nondenominational Christian commune wasn’t all bad. The widespread community gardens and continual lack of parental supervision were on point, if you were a five-year-old with mischief in mind.

I would pluck fat purple clover heads and suck the nectar from the florets. I’d make dandelion crowns and wear them for the hour or so they would last before wilting. Trees were made for climbing and lounging. But I can’t really pinpoint what else I might have done with wild plants. There has been no ancestral hand-me-down plant knowledge or any real sense of human-plant kinship born into me. Whatever relationship my own ancestors had to plants has fizzled, and I am left a blank slate, trying to reclaim the pieces.

Until this year, plants have been minimally on the agenda. I am reaching backward to pull the knowledge forward, into my era. Thankfully, there are people who learn and retain this knowledge and share it effusively. I’ve dug into the work of Dr. Nicole Apelian and Thomas Elpel, as well as picking up a few guides specific to my neck of the woods. My neck of the woods is particularly interesting and occasionally abundant, and we are standing on the precipice of that abundant time.

The strange thing is that I cannot bring myself to forage. My hunting brain says to keep moving, keep going, keep climbing, there are tracks, you must follow them, there is scat, how fresh is it, now another step and another. I keep thinking that I will one day stop to bend and pick, to take home and experiment, but I haven’t done this yet.

Instead, I find myself being in relationship with these plants as needed. I made a spit poultice of plantain for a bee sting on the trail the other day — chewing a leaf, packing it onto my hand and repacking it when it would inevitably fall off. I stop and pull usnea apart simply for the delight of its bouncy inner band that stretches and snaps. I picked my first wild strawberries a few weeks ago. I press my nose into flowering wild roses and keep track as they begin to flip themselves into rose hips, which I will pick for tangy nibbling all through September. The thimbleberries are about to come in, and I grab them by the handful when they ripen. They’re not great for keeping, but they are perfect for plucking and walking.

It makes me wonder if some of us are born one way or another, born to forage or born to hunt. I am so far on the hunting side that the foraging side seems slow and bulky. Do I really need to pluck a hundred arnica flowers to make a bruise compress? Or take home plantain as a natural bandage when I have modern-day healing tech in my cabinet? I love knowing that usnea is a wild fix-all, but is it more useful dried in my kitchen or left in its element?

My burgeoning plant literacy is forcing my hand on the matter. Building knowledge in herbalism is pushing the idea that I can further decouple my dependency on continuing consumption and reroute it toward a relationship with soil and place. I do love to hunt, but I hate to kill. The power of killing, dressing, and butchering big game animals lessens my dependence on the industrial meat market, and that is profound and impactful. I don’t think I’d kill if it weren’t for that aspect of the hunt.

As I gain more knowledge, I’m pressed to think further than just the meat in my deep freezer. I’m thinking more about food sovereignty and dignity and what these two pursuits might mean in a world that is designed around consumptive industries.

But there is also a feeling that I must turn everything that I learn or do into a resource, and as I write it out, I wonder if that subconscious conflict is preventing me from foraging. I don’t think I’m ready for the responsibility of foraging without deepening the relationship into more than just a new consumptive resource that I’m learning about. I haven’t figured out my positioning toward wild plants as I have with wild animals. When I hunt successfully, I am always leaving something behind for the ecosystem, as an offering of a sort. We share in the abundance of nutrients, blood, bones, and food. It is not one-sided, not as I see it.

How do I earn that sense with plant life? I think I need time to grow into that side of things.

I'll keep walking myself into the answers.