Gianna Russo

I’ve been a gardener since childhood, taking after grandparents on both sides. My paternal grandfather, in Brooklyn, planted the same vegetables he’d grown in the old country.  His garden covered his small backyard plot in straight rows. My maternal grandmother, in Florida, allowed wild phlox to flourish in her yard alongside grapefruit, guava, mulberry and the mystical night-blooming cereus. I daydreamed, sang, gathered, picked and made-up stories in those yards. In return, the plants offered their own stories that I learned to hear over time. Their leaves and stems, blooms, fruit and seeds are story. Even their death is a story. 

My first garden featured watermelon grown from seeds I spit out myself from a big juicy slice. Along the property line of my suburban childhood yard, wild blackberry bushes clutched at the field of their past. 

The tiny back yard I have now has gone through a number of makeovers, from vegetable gardens (mostly failed due to nematodes) to herb gardens (succumbed to Florida’s intense heat and rain), to its current state as a rather unruly butterfly garden that I am trying to turn all native. That’s where the beautyberry comes in.   

Beautyberry is native to Florida. I saw her (of course beautyberry is a “her”) one day in my neighbor’s yard where she was living up to her name bedecked in amethyst. My neighbor offered me a volunteer plant and we dug it up together. Beautyberry is planted in my side yard and my son built me a swing frame next to her. Her stories change throughout the year. They are written in her leaves, delicate frizzy blooms and purple berries. Watching her seasonal transformations, I can’t help but recognize the wheels of change turning in me. The theme of all the beautyberry’s stories is “cherish what is right now.”   

Florida is ground zero for climate change.  I have also heard it called the “poster child for rampant development.”  As a native, I have witnessed that truth and it breaks my heart. Singing to my grandchildren as they swing next to the beautyberry, I cannot help but dwell on the mutability of both. What will become of them in this fragile place, this planet that we ourselves make more fragile every day?  

When I’m with plants, I feel one with them. My humanness intersects their plantness in a spiritual Venn diagram. When I lose myself in marveling at the purple clusters of the beautyberry, when I walk among the blue porterweed shivering with visiting bees, when I gather handfuls of our native wildflower, coreopsis, for a spindly yellow bouquet, I don’t want any of our lives to change. But I’ve learned the stories of plants well, so well: cherish it now.