Christine Gelineau

I have nurtured and been sustained by a large organic garden every growing season from 1973 until the present, fifty summers then of awareness of and active participation in my embeddedness in nature and the botanical world. I live in south-central New York State in the Susquehanna River valley, just before that ancient river dips into Pennsylvania for the first time. My garden has always included corn, squash, and beans, the Three Sisters of the Haudenosaunee who gardened here in this valley for centuries before the Europeans arrived. I was fortunate enough to have attended a powwow back in the mid-1970’s where I learned to grow the Three Sisters in the Haudenosaunee way, in harmony with one another, the corn companionably circled to promote self-pollination, the beans supported by the corn stalks, and the prickly squash vines the circle’s outer moat discouraging the depredations of raccoons. Besides the corn, squash, and beans, my garden has always included tomatoes, peas, lettuce, spinach, and then a long list of other plants, some of which became staples, some more along the lines of experiments: potatoes, kale, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, watermelon, carrots, peanuts, onions, garlic, basil, dill, parsley, rosemary, sage, nasturtiums, marigolds (just as companions for the tomatoes), decorative corn, pumpkins. None of us can exist without ingesting the world but only some of us make that recognition central to our way of being in the world. Those of us who do live with that awareness cannot help but feel the urgency of what we know our singular species to have done to the trembling, interconnected web that makes life possible—the air, the water, the fecund and generous earth with its mantle of green. We cannot let go of the hope that through language, the urgency can be communicated. Thanks to Plant-Human Quarterly for providing a place from which such voices may be raised and amplified!