After reading Braiding Sweetgrass, a remarkable memoir by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an indigenous woman, botanist, and environmental scientist, I decided to plant a Three Sisters garden, a community of corn, squash, and beans. I am not a gardener. I have a long history of planting beautiful gardens and letting them shrivel from lack of water.
My old life used to be so busy that I could barely attend to my own needs, let alone the needs of the plants that I had invited into my environment. I unrealistically decided that if the plants wanted water, they should go and get it themselves. Obviously, this was not the way to a lush garden, and I assumed that gardening was not for me, or for that matter, for the plants that I planted.
Yet, soon after I moved to Wendell, things felt different. What was different? I had been on the road for ten years, slowing down and letting my life unfold rather than forcing it into existence. I had learned to let the wind take me and count the blessings wherever I landed. I had watched my beloved die, and I then come back to life. I had learned that to survive the storms that surrounded me, I needed to care for myself. I needed to drink water, get rest, find nourishment.
As I learned to care for myself, I learned to take joy in tending to growing things. I loved to watch the cycle of preparing the garden bed, planting the seed, blessing the growth as it unfolded, and celebrating the beauty.
And so, following the guidance of Robin Wall Kimmerer, I planted Three Sisters — corn, squash, and beans. Each of the sisters contributes something to the planting. Together, the sisters provide a balanced environment from a single planting.
As the first planted and older sister, the corn offers the beans necessary support. The pole beans, the giving sister, pull nitrogen from the air and bring it to the soil to benefit all three. Squash, the slow-growing sister, provides broad leaves that shelter the base of the corn and beans, keeping moisture in and other plants out.
I built the container that would hold the miracle of growth, planted the corn first, and surrounded this new possibility with seeds that would turn into squash and beans. After the planting, I looked at the dirt. There was no evidence of the abundant growth that was to come. It simply looked like good, dark, almost black dirt. The mystery was hidden.
Would the miracle happen? I didn’t know, but I watered and watched until tiny seedlings pushed their heads up through the soil, announcing their presence in the previous emptiness of the earth.
Time passed, and the corn stood tall with a fringe topping that waved in the wind, spreading its pollen down on the bulging bumps that had started to appear on the stalks. At first, tiny strands of hair glowed in the summer sun, reminding me of a pregnant woman in the first stages of pregnancy. There was a promise, but it was unclear what would be coming.
Only about a dozen ears of corn grew from my first attempt. I could have easily gone to my local farmstead and bought a dozen ears on any summer day.
But that is not the point. I was blessed to have watched the most basic energy of the Universe right under my own eyes. From the tiny seed comes the plant and food that nourishes me. All the intelligence the seed needs is packed inside of itself. And if that is true for the seed, it could be true for me. All I need is the sun’s energy, the gift of some rain, and the care of those who love me.
How could anything as high as an elephant’s eye come from a shriveled seed looking more like a small pebble than any form of life? And how do the plants show us ways to care for each other? We are surrounded by mystery.