Anne McCrary Sullivan

When I was a teenager and my mother was a doctoral student in marine biology, one of her best friends was a botanist.  I understood my mother’s work, the fascination with creatures who moved and behaved in interesting ways.  I could not understand her friend’s passion for plants.  I mean, plants don’t do anything.  I thought.

For many years I loved plants in a general way, the greenness of trees, the beauty of flowers.  Then, when I went to the Everglades for the first time, I entered the shock and pleasure of intimacy with individuals of the botanical world. 

I would live in Everglades National Park for a full month as artist in residence, a gift of immersion and attention.  It was a period of time dedicated to being in close, slow relationship with the natural world, both animals and plants.  Although some animals stayed still long enough for me to observe them closely, commune deeply, most didn’t.  Plants were more cooperative. 

I learned to pay attention to my bodily and emotional responses to specific plants.  Poems became the instruments by which I focused my attention.  Poems called me to dwell, to contemplate, to know myself in the presence of individual plants, noting fine details, making connections in memory and imagination.  Sometimes a plant would arouse my curiosity to a degree that sent me looking for information about its cultural history.

That experience in Everglades National Park was quite a few years ago, but my engagement with the plant world was set in motion, and my relationships with plants deepen.  Recently, I have been learning just how profound was the error of my teenager self.  Plants do have behaviors and personalities.  They learn.  They communicate among themselves.  The more I learn about plants, the more I want to know.  And poems continue to be significant instruments of my learning.