Seeds and Summers End

As we embark on another changing of the seasons, we have an opportunity to reflect on the recent past. It is easy — tempting, even — to roll all the negative, scary, stressful events of the past six months into one big anomalous nightmare. We may have heard the phrase, or perhaps even uttered it ourselves: “I just wish things would return to normal.”

This feeling is understandable — one would have to think that anything would be better than the current state of the world. As we reach a natural transition point in our year, however, and as we take this opportunity to reflect, we must also see the potential for more. We know that the unemployment, inadequate healthcare, and lack of affordable housing we see in our communities today are not new or recent issues. It is not coronavirus that caused the death of George Floyd — it was centuries-old systems of state violence and oppression.

How do we live with these disappointments, these evils? What gives us hope in these times? You might respond to these questions any number of ways, but to us, the answer, in a word: seeds. This is the time of year when we walk Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary collecting the seeds and seedheads of native grasses and wildflowers, from little bluestem, to lobelia and blazing star. In so doing, we are investing in the future — our future, one with ecosystems that renew themselves and rejuvenate us. As we head into the next year, we’re partnering with organizations like Friends of the Mississippi River and Mississippi Parks Connection to update our Natural Resource Management Plan, to establish and protect native plantings that hold cultural value to Dakota people. This is but one way in which we are reclaiming relationships with green space and taking action to create the future habitats we envision.

This past Saturday, we celebrated the history of Phalen Creek as a critical relation to the Dakota people and the waterways of this area. We shared how the creek came to be named for Edward Phelan, a European settler and murderer who had no valuable or respectful relationship to the creek and its many gifts, no understanding of water as life. At this event, we acknowledged the present — we told of how the creek is lost to us, bound up in concrete, and channeling waste from one place to another. And, at this event, we envisioned the future. We envisioned the creek brought back to the surface, a creek named for its relations with Dakota people and Dakota land, a creek respected and shared by the community. The seeds of these changes, the vision of a thriving ecosystem of a creek once again flowing above ground — these seeds were planted precisely because they contain knowledge of the past.

[Above, clockwise from top left: (1) one of our Phalen Creek Story Stroll exhibit signs gives compelling reasons to daylight the creek; (2) carnations make waves along the path of Phalen Creek; (3) artists put the finishing touches on one of seven cut-flower art installations; (4) visitors watch one of the afternoon performances. (All photographs courtesy of Caroline Yang). ]

When we talk about seeds and flowers and names and communities, novelist and avid gardener Jamaica Kincaid comes to mind. Kincaid has written extensively about Antigua, the small Caribbean island where she was born and raised, and the beautiful complexities of life there. In a recent piece, reflecting on the motivations for cultivating specific plants, Kincaid writes, “The garden figures prominently in the era of conquest.” She goes on to examine how European colonists and explorers came to possess and name new (to them) plants. She laments that in the present, the fields of botany and ecology are dominated by naturalists and “plant hunters [who] are the descendants of people and ideas that used to hunt people like me.”

[Author Jamaica Kincaid stands outside in her garden, hands clasped in front of a shovel. She wears a black cut-off t-shirt with the phrase, “I Can’t Breathe” printed on the front.]

White supremacy is interwoven in the fabric of American society, and this extends to the way we name and relate to plants, wildlife, and all beings that make up our non-human kin. The streets of the East Side, for example, bear names like Magnolia and Jessamine. As examined by Christopher Lehman in his book, Slavery's Reach, the names for these St. Paul streets came from slaveholding landowners who sought to create in the Minnesota territory a replica of their southern lifestyle. To have, in 2020, streets named for the flowers cultivated on southern plantations, streets named over a century ago by slaveholders seeking their own comfort and dominance on this land, is a shameful reminder about which narratives we choose to respect, and it brings more attention to the glaring omission and exclusion of Indigenous perspectives.

There is much about American society that seems to be infertile; polluted; broken. But, from an ecological standpoint, restoration projects are always, inevitably, long-term endeavors. Restoring a habitat is about embracing uncertainty; it is about perseverance. When we return collected seed to the soil — whether balled up in mud debris, mixed and scattered over the prairie in late winter, or planted by hand — we are using resources familiar to us and to the seeds themselves: nitrogen, oxygen; water, sun. Yet we are also trusting that the land knows what it wants to grow, what new life it can hold. And perhaps the same could be said of our society. The abolition of policing and mass incarceration; comprehensive, universal healthcare; accessible and sustainable infrastructure and institutions; sovereignty of Indigenous lands and life. We must use knowledge we already carry with us to foster these new changes; and we must trust that our world will nourish and sustain what we have borne.

[An artist smiles while laying flowers at one of seven art installations along the path of Phalen Creek. Photo credit: Caroline Yang.]

We encourage you all to take this time to reflect; to take stock of what you contain and bear out; to collect and store what you want to see grow. The time will come to plant seeds of change, but if we want these seeds to grow, we must be patient. We must trust that this world we seek will come.