What we call beautiful
The last book I took from the shelf at the Lawrence Public Library and read leisurely in one of the stuffed chairs, in March 2020, was Sean Sherman’s The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen. It is a beautiful book, and reading it made me hungry. Now, nearly two years later, Mr. Sherman, who is Oglala Lakota and so of a region not too distant from here, will be the keynote speaker via Zoom this Saturday at Cultivate Kansas City’s Annual Farmers and Friends Meeting, which will follow the theme “Adaptation and inclusion.”
I will take part as a panelist with other flower growers in Breakout Session number two and have been asked to think a bit about these themes as they relate to flower farming, and as I do, my mind edges away from humans. I’ve been around the floral trade (I mean all of it—not just growers but also designers, importers, retailers, the gamut) since the late 1980s, and while there are definite and serious problems of equity I can name when I consider the national and worldwide trade, I believe it is possible for sincere people who are nothing like mainstream find a community in it (though this may not be so in the field of farming generally).
It’s the material itself I ponder—what do we include? Do we know a native plant from an invasive? What effect does this have on the land itself?
When I consider first what wild foods I have gathered myself and eaten here—or could gather—my list is dishearteningly short. There have been banner years for wild black raspberries and wild grapes that I have collected by the gallon and frozen, or juiced then frozen. Years ago I worked with ecologists who had studied which plants the native people here used as food before European settlement, including the roots of some native plants most humans here now could not identify. We might be familiar with juniper berries, the seeds of wild sunflowers, hickory nuts, certain mushrooms (must be careful with those), purslane. And I have known some who hunted with bow and arrow for deer and wild turkeys (and I am just back from four weeks in Tucson, where I saw bow hunters almost daily in Tucson Mountain Park, along with the mountain bikers and hikers). If we included wild foods from our own place in our diet, what would change?
Here, we’ve lost most the native landscape, the habitat for these wild foods. In Douglas County, less than 1 percent of the prairie that stood prior to European settlement is gone, and though it is worth our time to care for the land to bring back native species, we can never fully restore a prairie; much of it is below ground, in the soil microorganisms. This region is a great place to grow things, and we’ve plowed it up. Most of the original native forest is gone or changed, too.
Turning to flowers—ornamentals, which are down the list of essentials, after cuisine, bread, beer—the question is what we consider beautiful. Across North America, and in Europe, Australia, we see Instagram feeds with the same locally cultivated flowers. What, though, is native to each of these places; what do we miss? The photo here is of a wedding bouquet from last September; the lacy white flowers that form the base are tall boneset (or tall thoroughwort), Eupatorium altissimum. When I was part of the Native Medicinal Plant Research Program at the University of Kansas here, we grew it in a production row, and I’ve also foraged it wild (you have to respect both modern property lines and the plant stand itself if you forage). As with any flower you cut, the bloom stage, time of day and care of the material before using it in design all determine whether it will work.
But, back to the questions of what we include and what we consider beautiful. I have made altars and defined sacred space for weddings with branches of cottonwood, native oak, juniper, even invasive autumn olive. Are these not as beautiful, and more fitting here, than eucalyptus from California or tropical greens from Florida? Or does beauty only become so if it is novel to us?
I have written this hastily and have no claim of doing more than putting down first thoughts. But I carry these questions, too often in silence.