Death of A Plant
Now when the tomatoes are sweetest, I know summer is starting to end. As the air cools I am filled with a sense of dread that soon the leaves will fall and most plants either die or assume the appearance of death. I try to hold onto summer as long as possible through preserves. Jams made out of summer peaches taste like bursts of sunshine in the winter. A tomatillo salsa verde in the heart of January is like teleporting back to the hottest August days. A tomato canned today is almost as floral and flavorful months from now. Preserving food locks in taste and cheats time.
From the vantage point of the supermarket, our current food system overrides this seasonal pause and we continue to get melons in the heart of winter and imported flavorless berries. It has allowed many of us to avoid contemplating or understanding the death and dormancy of the natural world. The life cycle that takes place on farms, where fields lay fallow to regain nutrients and sometimes crops are burned to feed the ground, is hard to grasp as a city dweller like myself. The end of a plant's life and the end of a season is not fixed, it is part of the larger nutrient exchange. Death for a plant can be an act of replenishing.
For my birthday last year, my cousin gave me a little okra seedling, and even though it wasn’t supposed to live in an NYC climate, I put it on my fire escape and witnessed it grow tall and eventually blossom. I had never seen an okra flower and it was yellow and very pretty, so unlike the slimy vegetable that comes from it. I was smug and anticipating the fruit but somewhere in the days that followed, the flower shriveled and died. And then the rest of the plant turned brown and dry. I felt responsible, guilty, and sad. It feels terrible to kill a plant. Discouraging.
Death is part of our relationship to plants even for those who are seasoned horticulturalists. Farmers are acquainted with plant death because they have to account for it. There is always the risk of a downturn, an unforeseen climate shift, a rare disease, a lack of nutrients in the soil. This week as fires ravage the west coast and people working the farms are forced to harvest food in increasingly inhumane smoke and heat levels, the precarity of our food system is obvious. In a year where farmers were already forced to throw out unsellable produce, they can’t risk another loss, and so the people most intimately acquainted with the land are weathering the extreme and unsafe conditions.
Many farm owners have found ways to account for this inherent instability, whether it is a seasonal contract, a community-supported agriculture program, or a heavy reliance on chemicals. Their livelihoods are linked to the wellbeing of another species and, by proxy, the rest of the population relies on the lives of these plants as well. On average, one US farmer produces food for 155 people. While we may only see images of flamed cloaked farms, we are physically linked to them. Acres of cropland will be damaged. There is simultaneously a tragedy in the loss and a truth that fire is not antithetical to life. A burned field leaves room for new things to grow.
The metaphors lent to us by plant life cycles are not entirely heartening. They do not leave room for grief or heartache, but on a tangible level, they offer an example of how death is not a fixed state but a transient one. In nature, with death often comes rebirth. Mushrooms grow in felled forests, trees populated Fukushima and in the pot where my okra once was is a healthy little tree that somehow made its way there to live and thrive off of what the okra left behind.
