Lucille Lang Day

Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants

I am deeply grateful to plants for their beauty, for producing the oxygen we breathe, for using the energy of sunlight to create carbon compounds, and for forming the foundation of food chains and providing sustenance to the rest of creation. If it were not for plants, I wouldn’t be here. No one would. So I write about plants to celebrate them, honor them, and show how they are interwoven with my life. For example, on a recent walk in Upper Bidwell Park in Chico, California, a yellow flower was gleaming in a field of oatgrass. One of my companions, who first thought it was a California poppy, photographed it and later identified it as a yellow mariposa lily (Calochortus lutes), aka gold nugget. It has three petals with red-brown markings like small splatters of paint on the lower part of each one. Endemic to California, the yellow mariposa lily is sometimes included in habitat restoration projects. All of this is important to me: the beauty of the flower, its description and scientific name, its importance in ecosystems, the walk with friends, the photograph to remind me of that day. In “Returning to the Butchart Gardens,” I share how flowers have shown up at each and every stage of my life and are not separate from my life, not mere decoration, but an integral part of the story. I also love trees.

Lucille Lang Day is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and Becoming an Ancestor. She is also the editor of Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery; coeditor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California; and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California; and author of two children’s books and a memoir. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart nominations. She is founder and publisher of Scarlet Tanager Books. https://lucillelangday.com