Women Who Travel Podcast: How Plants Help Us Understand Our Heritage

18.04.2024 - 12:03 / cntraveler.com

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Life begins again in spring, and as the air (and your nostrils) fill with pollen it might be a good time to learn something new about the plants with which we share the earth. To do so, Lale talks to nature writer Jessica J. Lee about how, as she's lived around the world, learning about non-native plants has given her a sense of belonging. From cherry blossoms to seaweed to tea, plants cross borders by themselves or because we move them for very different reasons.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu and this is Women Who Travel. This episode, we ask what happens when plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? Is it any different from humans who move? When are they considered out of place? When are they allowed to belong? And are they accepted or rejected by the people who live there? Can we look at plants to better understand our own relationship with the world?

Jessica Lee: I sort of started with plants that were intimately connected to me, and I kind of just said, "Okay, what are you telling me? Are you telling me something about poetry? Are you telling me something about the history of plant breeding?" I just sort of asked questions of each plant to begin with. I gave myself that permission to play.

LA: My guest is Jessica J. Lee, who's Canadian and of Chinese and Welsh ancestry. She currently lives in Berlin, and she's an environmental historian who also teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and is a children's book author. Right now, Jessica's talking to me from her Taiwanese mother's home in Ontario. Jessica talks of how her mum constructed a koi pond in their home in suburban Canada, but Ontario winters are harsh, and so when it got cold, the fish were moved to a tank in the dining room. It was a relentless attempt to recreate a Taiwanese landscape far from home. Your mother has a koi pond in Canada where you are right now, I think you are at that house.

JL: I'm at my mother's, yes.

LA: Does she have a koi pond now, or was that left behind?

JL: She doesn't have a koi pond now because she's in an apartment, but she does have a fish and a garden still, but in most of the places she lived where she could still have a koi pond, she had one, and it was this way of connecting herself to home and a kind of past aesthetic of growing up in Taiwan and the ideal garden that she wanted to see in her life.

LA: I really love the way that you are able to use this writing about plants to talk about all these other parts of your life and the way it's all interconnected.

JL: When I was trying to title this book, I kept coming back to the idea of