Pam Baggett

Was there ever a time I wasn’t aware of plants? Our backyard weeping willow, the wax myrtle cave my sisters and I played in on “our” island, native azalea blooms we plucked to sip the drop of nectar at their tips before we dropped them in the sand. Live oaks and Spanish moss, seaweed suddenly slapping against my leg before being swept away by the next wave. When my mother moved us inland, I lost my grounding. What was this tree-dark skyline? Yet, slowly I came to love the oaks, hickories, maples that towered over me, their shaded majestic beauty. I came to love green. Then gardening and an attempt to study organic agriculture at my home-state university in the early 1980’s. I failed, and found myself in the Farm and Garden Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, seven months living in a tipi in a bio-intensive garden lush with food and flowers. Broccoli, lettuces, spinach. Tithonias, zinnias, baby’s breath, leonotis. Scented geraniums that grew big as shrubs. Rosemary and lavender bushes where snails sheltered from the sun by the dozen. Fields of dry-farmed tomatoes. 

When I came home to North Carolina, I never really moved back indoors. A full-time gardener, then nursery owner, and now a happily retired horticulturalist who loves the sun-bright joy and shadowed mystery of my thirty-eight rural acres. I love plants as friends, as family worthy of my protection. All around me, landowners are clear-cutting to feed the maw of a wood pelletizing plant that ships fuel to Europe. They burn our trees to meet their commitment to reduce fossil-fuel use. Where is sanity? It’s in the forests still standing: summer’s stained glass light, the rattle of dry beech leaves that cling until spring. It’s in my meadow, where wild pink asclepias perfumes the June air. In broomsedge and fat blackberries, fall’s goldenrod and frost asters. In winter’s coniferous pines and cedars that keep the promise of another year of greening.