Learning to See - A Plant Story

There is a particular joy that comes from finally noticing something that was always there.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately - how attention works, and how it has to be cultivated almost like a skill. A plant can grow on your own property for years, quietly doing its thing, and remain essentially invisible until the moment is right and it reveals itself to you.

A few years ago I planted Mayapple in my woodland garden - Podophyllum peltatum - that bold, architectural plant that emerges in May. It will eventually form a colony of pleated, umbrella-like leaves. For now it has settled in beautifully, but it hasn't bloomed yet. And so over the last few years in the spring, I have found myself doing the same thing: stopping, bending down, lifting a leaf to check. The flower, when it finally comes, will hang there underneath - creamy-white and waxy, completely hidden from anyone who doesn't know to look. Mayapple will not show itself to a passing glance. It asks something of you first. In the meantime, it has taught me the gesture of looking.

When I first moved into our new home a few years ago, I also planted Hepatica and Bloodroot, as tiny seedlings. And Shooting Star, and Geum triflorum in the sunny part of the garden. I have been watching them, the way you do with things that arrive slowly (the Bloodroot bloomed for the first time this spring - such a gift).

While I was busy watching the plants I had put in the ground, the woodland was doing its own gentle work. Wild strawberries threading through the understorey... violets tucked into the grass. And yellow trout lilies - Erythronium americanum - carpeting the forest floor in their hundreds. They have been there all along, of course. But did you know that only a small fraction of trout lilies in any stand actually bloom? The rest send up their mottled leaves and nothing more. To find the flowers you have to walk slowly, looking. You have to want to see them.

And here is what surprised me this spring: When you get something on your mind, that's when you finally get to notice it.

Spring beauty taught me this. I wrote about Claytonia virginica in our April note: its tiny pink-veined petals, its relationship with the little bee that depends on it almost entirely. And then, not long after, I found it growing on my own property. It had almost certainly been there for years. But I hadn't had the eyes for it yet it seems.

Blue-eyed grass (which is not a grass per se, but a member of the iris family) gave me the same lesson a few years back. I only realized it was occurring naturally in my woodland garden the year it bloomed - those tiny violet-blue flowers, no bigger than a fingernail, suddenly visible against the green. How delightful! I made a note to collect seed a few weeks later. And then when I went back to find it - I could not, for the life of me, locate it amongst the sedges. Without the flower to announce itself, it had simply disappeared back into the crowd. The plant had shown me something, and then softly taken it back.

Noticing is not the same as knowing. It has to be practiced, returned to, earned again each season.

I am still learning to see. I suspect I always will be.