Braiding Sweetgrass

hint of leaf mold and rainwater. Potato leek soup, wild leek risotto,
or just a bowl of leeks are nourishment for body and soul. When my
daughters leave on Sunday, I’m happy to know that something of
their childhood woods will travel with them.
After dinner, I take the basket of unwashed leeks to the tiny
patch of forest above my pond to plant them. The harvesting
process now unfolds in reverse. I ask permission to bring them
here, to open the earth for their arrival. I search out the rich moist
hollows and tuck them into the soil, emptying my basket instead of
filling it. These woods are second or third growth and sadly lost
their leeks long ago. It turns out that when forests around here
grow back after agricultural clearing, the trees come back readily
but the understory plants do not.
From a distance the new postagricultural woods look healthy; the
trees came back thick and strong. But inside something is missing.
The April showers do not bring May flowers. No trillium, no
mayapple, no bloodroot. Even after a century of regrowth, the
postfarming forests are impoverished, while the untilled forests just
across the wall are an explosion of blossoms. The medicines are
missing, for reasons ecologists do not yet understand. It might be
microhabitat, it might be dispersal, but it is clear that the original
habitat for these old medicines was obliterated in a cascade of
unintended consequences as the land was turned to corn. The land
is no longer hospitable for the medicines and we don’t know why.
The Skywoman woods across the valley have never been
plowed, so they still have their full glory, but most other woods are
missing their forest floor. Leek-laden woods have become a rarity.
Left to time and chance alone, my cutover woods would probably
never recover their leeks or their trillium. The way I see it, it’s up to
me to carry them over the wall. Over the years, this replanting on