Rowan looked down at her notes and flipped back a page. She briefly looked up and caught Juniper’s gaze. “Absolutely.” Then she looked back down at her notes. “Um, sorry backing up. What’s salicornia?”
“Salicornia is a maritime succulent. Some folks here call it pickleweed. It grows in salt marshes. They look like little green shoots that taste like what the ocean would taste like if it were a plant.”
“Oh, interesting,” Rowan scribbled additional notes in the margin, “are there health benefits for eating salicornia? Like you mentioned with the asparagus?”
“There are a lot of bioactive metabolites in salicornia, basically helping prevent hypertension and inflammation. We also ate it because we like it. It’s salty and crunchy.”
Rowan let out a slight laugh. “It’s such a misconception about Indigenous people that every single thing we do is tied to some grander purpose. We can enjoy things for the simple act of enjoying them too,” she mused.
“Right. Is that something you picked up on… working with other Indigenous people?”
Was she really asking her about herexperience? Well, fuck it. She thought it would be interesting to know.
“That seems to be a universally Indigenous experience. The result of all that romanticization and mysticism about us,” Rowan laughed as she wiggled her fingers like a magician, her pen bobbing up and down in her hand. “Not all of us talk to raccoons or have weeping willow trees for grandmothers.”
Juniper couldn’t help but laugh. “So true.”
Rowan smiled warmly at her. “Junie, really though, this place is amazing. This is like an ethnobotanist’s experimental playground.”
Juniper had never really thought of herself as an ethnobotanist. Sure, she studied the relationships between plants and humans, her Tribe specifically, attempting to catalog all their medicinal, spiritual, cultural, and practical uses of plants. That still felt like too formal of a title, one earned through formal education.
“Maybe,” she ventured.
Juniper caught herself looking contemplatively at Rowan for a few seconds, and she realized Rowan had been doing the same to her. She launched back into teaching mode and took a few steps further.
Turning back on her heels, she asked, “What do you know about ethnobotany?”
“A little. I double majored in ecology, mostly coastal wetlands… along with public policy.”
There it was, more evidence of the very different paths their lives had taken over the last fifteen years. Juniper’s automatic response would normally be to shut down or start up her snarkiness again. Instead, she embraced her openness to learnsomething from Rowan.
“Can I see your notes? I’m just curious.”
“Sure,” Rowan offered her notebook.
Juniper flipped through the pages, scanning each one thoroughly. Rowan had drawn a schematic for each row of the garden, notating key information Juniper had shared, like the names and approximate or expected numbers of each plant, descriptions of the way they looked during the cycle of growing they were in, and even little drawings and labels for each one. Juniper couldn’t figure out anything to say. She was actually speechless, for once. She simply looked up at Rowan.
“I do take this seriously,” Rowan offered delicately, almost like she was anticipating the next question at the edge of Juniper’s lips.
“Do you… why do you…” Juniper scrunched her eyebrows together and tried to formulate a question, somewhere lost in Rowan’s softened, deep brown eyes she couldn’t look away from.
“This is what they teach you in ecology when you walk the land, to take accurate field notes, with lots of descriptions and sketches. You’re supposed to create a full mental map of everything you see so you can reference it later. I haven’t done this in a while, but it seemed like a good thing to do with everything you were… teaching me.”
Another unspoken question answered as if she still knew her like the back of her hand. Perhaps more importantly, she answered those questions as if she knew the way Juniper needed her to – gently, thoughtfully.
Juniper pressed the notebook into her chest before realizing what she was doing. Like all the notes, sketches, and intention held in that notebook were calling toward her own heart. “Here,” she quickly pushed the notebook off her chest and back toward Rowan. “Thanks for letting me look.”
Juniper started to walk again, attempting to put distance between herself and whatever she had just felt with every step.
“You haven’t had any help doing all of this?” Rowan askedwithout moving.
Juniper stopped walking and turned around to face Rowan, happier with the distance.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that at all. Ancestors are always there to guide if you listen. And you can learn a lot from the teachings of plants.”
“Well, I mean, yeah,” Rowan began to intellectualize before stopping at the sight of Juniper’s lifted eyebrow. “Of course,” she offered quickly, “I just mean physically day in and day out. This is the product of your labor.” Rowan waved around at the acre brimming with plants for emphasis.
“It is.”
