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i. Puffball
It must have been my father who first taught me about puffballs.
I can’t remember if I had the interest first,
or if it began when I got a small book on mushrooms for Christmas.
Pocket-sized, palm-sized, I took it on Sunday walks.
Wanting to identify and read out fungi facts.
Be right in my natural history.
Fungus was appreciated family-wide.
Their alien, eccentric, sponge-like bodies,
Their ever-present desire to multiply.
Their kingdoms an unexpected presence, in cracks, gaps, hollows, filling fields, fallen Oaks.
Stinkhorn, Beefsteak, inky black cap, creamy gills.
My dad drawn to fly with the fly agaric,
longing to transcend the daily and mundane.
Exploring, we found the remains of a huge puffball.
White, chalky, a broken-edged base,
must have been as big as a football.
We stood around, encircled,
as if attending the aftermath of fire.
We theorised it had been kicked
and the image,
alive,
like a puff of spores,
in my mind.
I was told that you could eat puffballs,
considered a delicacy;
this friendly sphere, risen from earth
then cooked, fried, sliced
forks and knives clinking,
this small ball transformed into the edible.
I started to search for puffballs.
My nature table at home waiting -
a square, low, cheap pine surface,
able to elevate, elevating, maintaining
the status of special things I found:
berries, leaves, a speckled feather.
Gathering puffballs meant staying close to the ground.
Gave our walks particular purpose,
the family united in my circular vision.
Some weeks later
we found one:
small
classic white,
fitted into my palm,
carefully carried home,
like pearl relics.
Running upstairs, excited,
I took each item from my table
making space for my prize
so focused
I didn’t notice myself,
step backwards.
Step onto something round - like sponge! -
I squashed the whole puffball into carpet!
Mushroom forced into lines.
I didn’t realise until
about to place it into the space -
I cried!
Wept romantically at all things lost and found,
the quest befallen.
Some months later, without drama,
we did find more puffballs,
and my mother kindly cooked and fried
as I waited to dine
on slices of this plant,
with garlic,
feeling royal, refined.
ii. Politics
Plants are political.
Holding the capturing and cultivating
journeys of botanists
in their stems.
Empires, the seeds and winds that determined your growth,
Grand gardens frequently founded on such “glories”
and propagation histories
and their colonial ancestors.
Riches stolen from far-flung soil.
Nature’s natural order sublimated,
into a hierarchy of hubris and humans.
At Chelsea Physic Garden I learnt
how Joseph Banks broke off pieces of Icelandic lava
building English rock gardens as he sailed past.
How family beds became order beds,
how sunflowers clean and detoxify the soil.
How hemlock kills from the feet first,
the blood of Socrates equaling purple-reddish streaks.
Of Agatha Christie and her poisonous research,
and how nettles were uniformed into military green.
I heard of the fern collecting habits of the Victorians too,
How they viewed you as magical, mysterious, as you reproduced
in clouds of spore.
Passed down, my own desire for conquest,
expressed in teenage obsessive plant quests.
Asked my mother to help me seek out specific species of cactus, stone plant.
Restlessly searching the departments of Kent Garden Centres,
desperate for evidence of other lands.
Across the world, plants are medicinal,
aware of the women who died defending your properties,
aged eight I wanted to be a witch.
Would tempt my friend Eleanor into making potent herbal potions,
planting a succulent world of weird wild women
in her middle-class mind.
As a family, we spoke in plant names.
Not as a way to show-off or possess,
instead, etymology as intimacy.
A way into their families system from our own,
into individual expression,
an honouring of each plant’s idiosyncratic limbs.
Then my mother fell in love with your blues,
secretly stealing your seeds,
carrying dormant Morning Glories across borders,
your potential resting until ready to bloom.
iii. Psychics and the people who adore them
Plant, you hold properties
I can only imagine.
You are this other being, emanating
with a mind I can feel, but only
sometimes hear.
Steiner and the early Mystics listened,
plugged into other realms,
tuning-in to finer frequencies,
took notes as you spoke.
Plant you grow more when we talk with you.
Sentient as the carrots who know when their fellows are being cut,
suggests at an inter-weaving inter-connectedness;
a scene behind the scenes
I long to understand, be in, and touch.
Through Bach flower remedies,
I ingest you daily.
Tiny particles,
memories of you,
float in water.
Dropping families of you on my tongue,
slip-sliding your bodies into my body.
Elm diminishing overwhelm.
Wild Oat helps you decide your own mind.
Star of Bethlehem so often softens shock.
Clematis invites us fully into the room.
I once gave someone Olive and Gorse,
their depression drained away,
like bathwater.
An old flat-mate laughed as she told me
how she drank a small bottle of you,
unexpectedly, then, for three days, longing for a husband!
Whilst teaching, I discover orchids like company,
long for lush lovers in a bathroom draught.
Emanate air waves and chemistries, energies,
prettily, yet secretly, they’re hard at work on our etheric selves.
Regenerating oxygen, atmospheres, creating habitats within our homes.
Electromagnetic ecologies beamed from portable fields.
Plant, you take heat out of my cheek,
move my chi to a gentle simmer,
Ashwaghanda and its psychological stores.
I stuff my face in your face,
breathing blossom up my nose.
Drink your brown liquid herb-brothers,
Sent in the post from New Zealand.
Living with Mimosa Pudica, I attune to your demands.
Notice how you open wide in the morning sunlight
How you droop to wind, volatility, too much touch
Your leaves - your body - a brave closing request for the world to be as you would have it.
Plant, your innocence,
mis-perceived
like a book,
you function as a portal
to other places.
I don’t need ayahuasca
to travel
but I understand how you companion.
Remember
picking magic mushrooms, in fields, in Kent,
my eye attuning to your vertical.
We doubted the potency of your tea,
doubling you up, ate your slippery stems on toast
until you hit like vodka,
the suburbs suddenly psychedelic in your gaze.
Plant, you magnetise people to you,
transmitting a song
for bee, human, bird.
Sages love to be surrounded by you.
Hospitals now ban you in their health and safety code.
Told for years, I didn’t know how to look after you.
I believed them, over our relationship!
And it was only when I lived in the Artists Co-op -
(where the boundary between the garden and bathroom diminished each year,
where the dead bodies of worms were re-animated
by each leak of the washing machine!)
and everyone else ignored you,
that we actually stood a chance,
became close, intimate.
It was here that I brought you back
from the brink,
realised I could use my hands to resuscitate,
your leaf-lets flourishing at my touch.
I cared for your babies, learnt your symbiotic dance.
Plant, I feel like our love affair has just begun,
And your mauve and purple now adorn my front door.
You’re mulchy green, you’re verdant matter,
you’re sprouts and shoots and seeds and sex.
You’re petals and stamen and pollen.
You’re food and fuel, living enzyme matter,
You’re networks and fungi, an underground radio station in constant transmission;
the succulents are having a party, whilst everyone looks the other way.
Plant, you are edible potential.
Poetic text as part of Odes (PART OF A LARGER QUEST) book of poems and series of performance installations, 2019.