Love is all you need by Meg Keoppen c2010

My love affair with the plant world began early. Running with delight across a newly mowed hayfield, my senses filled with the light and smell of summer is one of my first memories. My world was crowded with friends like rose, spirea, lilac, maple, apricot, apple, sumac and green grass.

I often changed my perspective by climbing one of the cherry trees that bordered the whitewashed brooder house out back, pretending I was on a ship's mast sailing the winds. If melancholy clouded my view, I sought refuge with Old Maple in the front yard. January storms drifted snow over the barberry hedge along the driveway. We kids took advantage and climbed on that hedge encased in snow and used it as a shield during snowball fights.

All around us was deep deciduous woodland. Exploring that forest was natural for this country kid. My uncles and father were woodsmen. Aunts, too, answered the lure of the woods, hiking and canoing at every opportunity. I tagged along, graduating from picnics at the local swimming holes to walking on my own along favorite paths. Sometimes I went hunting with my dad. I noticed that as the years went by, dad and uncles mostly gave up hunting with guns and chose to shoot with a camera instead. I believe they used the gun and camera as an excuse. Their excursions were really about getting outside into nature.

Plants transform the place they grow in. Even if we are unconscious of their gifts, plants offer much. They give texture, color, scent, food, flavor, shelter and protection. Plants create habitat, providing food, holding soil in place and slowing rain runoff, filtering toxins from water, deflecting wind, shading the land and bringing moisture to the surface from under ground. In fact, plants have an intimate relationship with water. They help cycle water by sucking it from the earth and breathing it out into the atmosphere. Plants can keep ponds and rivers oxygenated and clean.

Imagine what your neighborhood would be like without plants. Rocks and dirt are great, but what would keep them in place when it rained? Would rain come at all? How would the soil be kept shaded and cool? Would there be water in evidence? What would you eat? Where would the animals and birds live? What color would your world be?

I was deeply shocked and saddened at the age of nine. The road in front of our house was lined on both sides with large maple trees for a mile. The township decided that the road needed to be wider to accommodate more and faster cars. Every one those lovely trees was cut down. Old maple went with the others. Fifty years later that neighborhood remains exposed to the elements. Growing trees takes time.

I have never recovered. That experience stays with me, causing me constantly to wonder about our values as a culture and what the real costs of progress are. Sadly, most of us have similar stories of loss of open space, forests, diversified farmlands. We seem to have traded the natural world for the fleeting satisfaction of our own creations.

The miracle of life is that we have made this dream we live in. So, if we have dreamed it up, we can certainly dream it down. Thought by thought, breath by breath, word by word, step by step we can change the dream. Together we can heal this world.

Remember the scent of the woods.