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Why write about gourds for your autumnal plant newsletter when you can write about fire, death, disease, and time? If that's not your thing, scroll past the opening and head straight to the links.
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A year ago, I had just one plant in my care—a pothos clipping—and it had only two leaves. We did not get along. It hated everything about living in a mason jar on my windowsill. Eventually I set it on the kitchen table, out of the sun (which was, as it turned out, its nemesis). The vine now possesses (contains?) a long trail of 14 leaves. It has created these leaves at a relatively stable pace and has generated more stem-space on which to hold them, so it is now a visible, tangible timeline of its own life. It's a vine. In a line. In time. A timevine.
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It was my birthday a few weeks ago (have I mentioned this enough to everyone?!) All day long, going through my normal routine of dog walks and coffee stops, I felt delighted by this secret: I'd clocked precisely another year of being alive. It was a moment. Something to mark firmly and decisively, in an era when the calendar seems to skip and hop at random intervals. See also: I don’t know how it’s November right now, or maybe it’s been November for years.
Then I started thinking about how that slippery sense of time affects the experience of a crisis, maybe becoming a barrier to making sense of it . We've been living through a disaster that isn't a one-off, like an earthquake, or a flood. It's rolling admission. Without a communal timevine, what happens to our experience of… happening? How do we start to look back, from what feels like a safe distance, at something with no apparent end?
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I also spent a lot of my birthday thinking about fire, because that morning I couldn't stop reading this fascinating oral history about the 150th anniversary of Chicago’s historic, city-wrecking blaze. There's one little bit that I still can't stop thinking about. It's early on in the disaster, before anyone truly imagines that the city will go to ash, but crews are already deep in it—battling a growing fire with just a handful of horse-drawn engines. A 26 year-old foreman notices that his engine's water system has suddenly stopped pumping. He rushes to find an engineer and see what's going on.
The foreman remembers:
[The engineer] said there was one of the springs broke in the pumps. Said I, “Is it going to do her any hurt to run her?” Said he, “I do not know. It is running a big risk. I might smash that pump all to pieces.” Said I, “This is going to be a big fire. Smash her! We have got to run her.” He started her up, and she run first rate.
Smash her. We have got to run her.
That moment of risk calculation, for today's crisis, happened over and over and over. I mean, the lives lost in the Chicago fire are a rounding error on the zillionth decimal place, compared to the pandemic. But something about that flavor of desperate gamble twists my heart in a way that I can't quite explain. I can't read that moment without thinking, for example, of how it looks when an N95 mask has etched its outline into the bridge of a doctor's nose.
And then the fire got worse, of course. In 30 hours, it leveled the town and soaked the city with trauma and terror from corner to corner. When flames gutted the central water-pumping station, the game was up, the fire had won. People buried their important possessions in their backyards and let the fire take the houses, and straggled to the lakeside with their children and whatever they could carry, to watch their wooden city end.
And now? Well. Now there's a Chicago Fire soccer team. A few years ago, there was a bid for some kind of fun festival that referenced it— floats would go down the river and be set ablaze. Meanwhile the country's actual deadliest fire happened on the same day a couple hundred miles from there, and has been almost totally forgotten.
I don't think we will get a festival and a sports team out of this, even in 150 years. I can't imagine kitsch. But what instead? And when? Is there a forgetting? How do we make sure there isn't? When do we start making sure there isn't? Is it now? But we're so tired.
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Anyway. I think I'm asking this question now because I want to fast-forward. I want the vine wrapped all the way around the block and further than that, threaded through the whole entire city, wrapped around the Empire State Building and looped through the Brooklyn Bridge. I guess I want my timevine interlaced with everyone else's, and we all get whatever angle of sunlight we need.
In the interest of full disclosure, though, a leaf fell off the vine in the few days it took me to write this. So, we still have a ways to go.
What the plants are reading
Let’s page through their leafy list of recommendations, shall we? Here we go:
Here’s a whole bunch of acorns with faces on them and I don’t even know what to think about the aesthetic, but it seems like an appropriate activity for the times.
This deep dive into hedges and the industry of hedgelaying is pretty fascinating (h/t to the Granola newsletter!)
Hedgelaying is cold, remote and expensive work – and often goes unappreciated by farmers who have decided that a fence will do the job just as well. It's not an easy career, and simply by creating a bright point in the calendar, hedgelaying competitions are helping the craft, and the craftspeople, to thrive.
A bright point in the calendar can do a lot, it seems. For good measure, here’s another deep dive into a grower subculture: super-huge pumpkins.
On the virtue of weedy vacant lots in Honolulu, and also on the nature of weedy, fallow time.
I love this photo of an apple orchard after a storm—it seems like a big upgrade from a ball pit at the Chuck E. Cheese, and for my next birthday I’m requesting an apple field.
This entire explanation of how lily pads affected architecture continues to boggle the mind.
What else?
Here’s a bodega cat enjoying a vegetable:
Additional perspective on vegetables and biting:
Am entranced by this beautiful illustration of a squirrel and some vegetation. I love Diana Sudyka so much:
And finally: There is a BBC show apparently called Gardeners’ Question Time, and now I need to listen to every episode. I hope that, for at least one session, they question the nature of time itself.
Ok, that’s all I’ve got.
May all your timevines grow lush,
Lindsay
Administrative P.S.
Did you miss the last issue? Here it is. It’s about wintering, which you can do right now, even though it’s autumn.
This newsletter sends on Ẅednesdays because Ẅednesday is a great day to celebrate Vegetation 🌱 It is arriving on the right day today.
Feel free to reply to this, and I will get it like a regular email! Send me links or personal blooms for my entertainment. I love them all.