By Bobbi Sue Smith and Diane Lake
Lessons from the flower bed—the miracle of flowers, their infinite, intricate shapes and colours. They make us smile; we revel in their scents. We also need flowers for our very survival. Plants provide food and medicine—more than 1/3 of the diet for the world's billions come from flowering plants pollinated by bees and other insects.
Two plant lovers sat down to have a conversation about their early experiences of nature's handiwork—flowers, plants and trees. Bobbi Sue Smith, a West Coast artist transplanted to Paris and B.C. writer and photographer Diane Lake share their insights on how the natural world has influenced their artistic choices and how we can learn to recognize other species as our wild sisters and brothers. Perhaps then we can finally start to understand how we impact everything around us and become better, more responsible human beings.
Diane Lake, March 2025
Bobbi Sue Smith Whenever I catch the fragrance of lavender, earthy yet spicy-sweet, I am always transported, even if for only a moment, to my grandfather’s garden. There was a large hedge of lavender at the end of the long, dusty drive. We’d stop the car and emerge into a cocoon of scent, humming with bees dopey with nectar and sunshine.
The flowers followed us into the house, drying upside down in bunches, then transformed into comforting little sachets by grandma, tucked into closets and dresser drawers.
The roses too, bring grandfather to mind: beaming with pride, showing off the latest blooms of coral and peach and yellow and white tea roses that festooned the front steps, and tumbled outward to the gardens and encircled two-thirds of the goldfish pond there, like a backdrop for an imminent production of Romeo and Juliet.
The roses must have made a natural stage. In the whole acre of the hobby farm, this is where the family was hostage to the cousins’“theatre” productions. I recall being enveloped by the heady scents of rose, cedar, and lawn as we performed our choreography to the likes of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline pilfered from grandpa’s collection to the captive audience arranged in tiers on the front steps.
When all the adults were occupied with adult endeavours, I would make my way down the potato hill to the creek. I knew for certain this was the faery realm. Believing in my benevolence, I built for the faeries' tiny houses, boats, pools, gardens, and secret hiding places out of twigs, rocks, leaves, petals, and moss. When I felt I had contributed enough faery infrastructure for the day, I would wander off to sail coded leaf messages down the creek or look for owls whom I heard but who remained invisible in the dense tree canopy.
I remember at the Thanksgiving table, the grown-ups toasting the fact that everything on the table had come from the land we lived on and my grandparents’ hard work. I recall the feeling that someone who loved me, and who loved the land they tended just as much, had grown the food on my plate. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but it was a corporeal understanding borne of watching the careful and diligent way my grandfather loved his land, crops, and livestock, and the way each ingredient was honoured in the way my grandmother prepared them.
Grandfather was a man who sang Italian opera to his cows as he milked them. A man who valued each raspberry on the cane, each goose in the yard, and each rose on a bush.
He was also a staunch anti-capitalist. To him, self-sufficiency was a form of defiance in a world that looked to monetize our relationship with food, energy, and Nature. He was wed to his land.
Our family name, Rushton, translates as “a farm where rushes are grown” and first shows up in public records in the Domesday Book in 1086 in Staffordshire, England, the birthplace of grandfather’s father.
Rushes were essential to life in medieval Britain. They provided thatch to roof dwellings and mats to c over the floor, and very importantly were the main ingredient of a torch, or “rushlight”, the primary source of light besides the sun or hearth fire. Centuries of my lineage lived in concert with plants that provided shelter, warmth, and light. To be a Rushton is to live with, by, and for plants. My grandfather chose to leave England to give his growing children the opportunity to pursue something other than farming. But he brought those deep roots with him.
So how do I, daughter of this lineage, find myself in the heart of a metropolis of 11 million people? How do I remain “rooted” among the limestone facades, the throngs of tourists, the endless labyrinth of streets and shops?
My grandfather moved his family to Canada for opportunity and, as an artist, I moved to Paris because I could not resist the way the history and culture fuel my imagination and artistic practice. A very walkable city; I can accomplish all my daily needs on foot and any travel desires by train, which I much prefer to owning a car or flying. Beginning in March 2020, I spent one year of my life traveling no farther than my feet could carry me there and back in a day. Something was nourishing about that experience.
Walking has always been central to my art practice, regardless of locale and the medium I’m working in. Over the past 6 years, I have found my footsteps leading me more and more frequently to find plants in the intimate refuges of nature nestled among limestone and concrete.
For one, I take daily visits to my “jardin partagé”, a shared community garden. But beyond the places I help tend, I have made it a mission to discover all of the green spaces in the city. Green may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of Paris, but the city has over 420 parks, ranging from the tiniest of peaceful patches to a couple that are some 850 and 1000 hectares! No matter which area of the city my schedule takes me, I look for the parks available there and visit them. Sometimes, I just sit still and take it all in. But sometimes I bring my sketchbook and draw the plants which hold court in situ. This helps me connect with the sensation that nature prevails; nature is everywhere.
When I lived on the west coast of Canada, nature was everywhere around me, almost inescapable. I connected with plants in an organoleptic fashion, learning about them in an almost intuitive way. And when I moved to France, to a big city nowhere near the mountains or the ocean, I felt as if I had been exiled from the garden of paradise, and I suffered a form of homesickness I dubbed “nature-sickness”. In a museum, I once had the occasion to read a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo describing this very same malady shortly before the afflicted painter moved to Arles. I realized that short of leaving my beloved current home, I would have to find new ways to connect with nature than I’d known in Canada.
This inspired me to learn as much as I could about plants. I turned to formal ways of learning as a complement and a compliment of sorts to the way I grew up. Living in various forest and beach settings, I had learned about plants by daily observation and experience, but here I have been augmenting that with, I guess you could say, academic methods, like plant nomenclature and identification; ethnoecology; plant folklore and folk-magic; how to make dye, pigment, prints, and inks from plants; how to meditate with plants; and also exploring the long history of herbalism.
I've been drawing plants a lot, which is another way to get to know a plant intimately. Any plant that I’ve drawn or painted, I can spot anywhere because I’ve spent so much time getting to know each aspect of it––its stem, its leaves, texture, shades of colour, and habitat. Plants and their folklore have become central to everything I have thought about for the past four or five years––concerning my art practice, my life, what I read about, and what fuels my imagination. They are what guide my connection to the natural world.
We are all born little witches: making potions from creek water and mud, casting magical circles in petal and pebble for protection against the forest shadow creatures, and conversing out loud with flowers, trees, rocks, waterways, insects, winged and four-footed kindred. I don’t think this needs to change, whether we live in the rainforests of British Columbia, or a busy metropolis where flora and fauna are afterthoughts.
With the polycrisis that is 2025, I occasionally feel as if I’m ready to move to the forest to become a full-time herb-hag. To make my occupation again a builder of faery homes, tree-interviewer, flower-sower. But for now, I think my work lies here, in and of the world.
We can live a season-informed, plant-focused way of life by choice. We can talk to trees on our way home from work. We can learn homesteading skills just for the sake of preserving them from fading from collective memory. We can get involved in citizen science projects, recording data about trees, plants, animals, waterways, and the weather, to help raise awareness and action around our changing climate. We can raise herbs on windowsills. We can raise children to be in awe of nature, like my grandfather did for me. We can dye our clothes with avocado pits. Every act of connecting with nature matters. They are all rooted in a direct rejection of capitalism, which seeks to own, control, and exploit the natural world, all take and no give.
I’m realizing that to live a nature-centric life does not require me to move to a remote forest, although that dream is perennial. From the very breath I’m inhaling at this moment, through the dinner I’ll cook shortly, to the linen sheets I’ll sleep in tonight, my life is lived with, by, for, and most importantly because of plants.
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Diane Lake
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch.
This quote by Murdoch, the Booker award-winning novelist and celebrated Oxford professor of philosophy, expresses the sort of rapture I experienced as a curious kid noticing plants. Being around them was a way of submerging myself in beauty to stave off melancholy. It is a feeling that has stuck with me over the decades— being simply agape with wonder at this natural world where everything is living life to its fullest, weirdest, most resourceful potential—plants as mediator to the supernatural and healers of trauma to the body and soul.
Some of my earliest and most vivid memories growing up on the west coast of Canada are looking up at giant trees like western red cedars and Douglas firs, and wandering into gardens on my way home from school, admiring the enchanting colour and shapes, the myriad of insects burrowing and buzzing in and out to their heart's desire. The jaunty red and coral snapdragons, the favourite flower of my grandmother; the sweet smell of sun-loving carnations, the lush bushes of chrome yellow forsythia, the harbinger of spring. And oh those crocuses pushing exuberantly through the ground and the smell of soil now warm enough to allow macro flora to flourish.
Witness that magical kind of energy that small children have—that little girl sitting under the trees talking with flowers. Of course, flowers have lives of their own; they have the ability to communicate they care. There's this tremendous empathic relationship between the human and all the other life forms that surround the human with which children have an instinctual affinity. They have to be trained very vigorously to give up that experiential relationship with the world.
Along with the communion came a penchant for filching flowers. Yes, I confess, I simply could not resist picking them, a stealer of beauty, the better to prolong the state of wonder they bestow. I also wonder if I was a judicious and not a wanton picker: a flower here, a flower there from another patch so as not to diminish the overall abundance that their human gardeners had carefully planted, or that pollinators would miss. I hope so. The recipient of these small bouquets and nosegays while inhaling the fragrance on the way home was my mother as a token of my love. She was an avid gardener but more of a vegetable gardener—the planting of flowers was an afterthought for her.
So yes, I was mad with joy at these impossibly beautiful species all around. These resilient plants that grew everywhere, including seemingly inhospitable places—cracks in sidewalks, on rocks rooted with a dusting of soil. Wherever life can grow, it will. What a miracle and gift life is was the way I saw it.
All that grew on planet earth felt like my natural habitat and true home, unlike the unsafe-feeling brick and mortar compound dominated by a father given to alcoholism and rage. The alternative to living in this sort of hell was a longing to connect with nature and focus on love of the natural world. It was as if I remembered an early, ancestral place within me, where I felt a true companionship with the living world, not estrangement. As conservationist Aldo Leopold once said, to have an ecological education is to “live alone in a world of wounds.”
There has been a surge in scientific research in recent years on the intelligence of plants, including “The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth" by Zoe Schlagel. Schlagel, a science writer for Atlantic magazine, has spent years writing stories about the steady advance of climate change, and the health impacts of polluted air, water and soil. In other words, writing about humanity's unrelenting death plod. She says she began to search, without realizing it, for something in the natural sciences that felt wonderful and alive. She finds that sense of wonder in plants, and lavishly demonstrates how the vegetable kingdom is full of curiosities and mysteries.
For one, plants created Earth’s atmosphere, oxygenating it and making it breathable for animals like us. Likewise, she explains, “every thought that has ever passed through your brain was made possible by plants” because every animal organ is made out of sugars produced by photosynthesis, the wizardry through which plants transform light and air into the fuel that builds and powers our bodies. We get to hear the details of experiments around the world that demonstrate extraordinary capabilities, and hint at many beyond our current methods of detection.
We must not forget, though, while exclaiming as I tend to do about the natural world and bowing to its wisdom, that none of it has evolved for us. That it is, in many ways, a marvelous coincidence we would find any of it beautiful at all: flowers are not here purely for us to behold, trees do not grow because of us (more like in spite of at this point), and as far as I know, there are no measurable benefits to gazing up at tree tops. We too have evolved, have learned and been conditioned to appreciate many natural sceneries and forms, although I’m not sure that the same could be said the other way around. If you asked a tree, would it find you enchanting? If we could understand the discussions of green ants, would they have anything to say about the beauty of humans?
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a scientist and a Native American writer whose work is informed by both Western science and Indigenous environmental knowledge, spoke recently in Vancouver. She showed a diagram of a food chain, which, in human-centric fashion, had people at the top. The audience laughed. We are in fact just one part of an interconnected chain with no species at the top or the bottom. She called for the re-establishment of our relationship with the Earth, rejecting the notion of human exceptionalism that regards the planet’s finite resources as ours to plunder.
Kimmerer embodies the sort of environmental ethics that the world desperately needs. It was while studying forest ecology as part of her degree program that she first learnt about mosses, which became the scientific focus of her career. About them she wrote: "Mosses have this ability, rather than demanding a lot from the world, they're very creative in using what they have, rather than reaching for what they don't have. When there are limits, the mosses say, 'Let's be quiet for a while. Abundance, openness, water, will return. We'll wait this out.'”
Key to restoring what Kimmerer calls the “grammar of animacy” is viewing nature not as a resource but like an elder “relative” and to recognise kinship with plants, mountains and lakes. The idea rooted in indigenous language and philosophy (where a natural being isn’t regarded as “it” but as kin), holds affinities with the emerging rights-of-nature movement, which seeks legal personhood as a means of conservation.
I often think about how best to use my time and energy during these troubled times. We may not necessarily have the power to dismantle Monsanto, but we do have the capacity to change how we live on a daily basis and how we think about the world. I have to have faith that when we change how we think, we suddenly change how we act and how those around us act, and that’s how the world changes. It’s by changing hearts and changing minds.
Today, I give guided tours at the VanDusen botanical gardens, a 55-acre oasis in the heart of Vancouver with more than 7,500 plant species and varieties from around the world. I also tend a community garden plot, growing pollinator plants for the more than 450 native bee species in B.C.; there are about 30 species of bumble bees alone. Every year, I look forward to planting native flowers and plants our grandmothers grew—plants from the past with fewer showy petals are more attractive and accessible to pollinators than modern hybrids.
Like Bobbi Sue, I spend many hours walking in neighbourhoods on micro-adventures taking photographs. I think photographs will always be a critical and relevant medium to translate the beauty of our planet. They give us permission to pause and appreciate the finer details of nature’s handiwork. Images invite others to step into a more cognizant view of the world where we can learn to recognize other species as our wild sisters and brothers. Perhaps then we can finally start to understand how we impact everything around us and become better, more responsible, human beings.
About the Artists:
Diane Lake is a photojournalist living in Vancouver, B.C. Diane has had a chequered career—tree planter, dishwasher, reporter and editor at three daily newspapers, policy work at an environment based federal government department where she sometimes floated down rivers counting salmon. She loves walking and documenting bees and birds and other wonders of the world.
As a social and environmental activist, Diane is a long-time supporter of Palestinian freedom. To find out more about solidarity with Palestine, and how to stay in the loop about what you can do in the face of ongoing genocide, please contact Jewish Voice for Peace, Samouidin Network, Canadians for Justice in the Middle East.
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Bobbi Sue Smith is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist who lives and works in Paris, France. She has worked in solo and collective capacities in communities ranging from the isolated to the metropolitan. Her work explores the intersection of cultural memory and the natural world. Folklore, an inherent vehicle for ancestral memory, is a primary source. She is particularly drawn to the symbolic and functional roles of plants in our rituals, oral history, healing traditions, and textiles. She aims to recover and create narratives that foster a renewed appreciation for the natural world and its innate claim on our imagination.
Smith has curated The Uncommon Show at the Artist Resource Centre in Vancouver; and Shrink: A Show of Pocket-Sized Art, at Make Studio in Nanaimo. She has also exhibited at various shows and galleries in British Columbia. This includes exhibitions both solo (Uscocci Manufactory) and group (Turnbull Gallery, White Rock; Interurban Gallery, Vancouver; Federation of Canadian Artists Gallery, Vancouver; The Art Centre, Powell River; and at Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver).
Instagram @thefolktailor
Website bobbisuesmith.com
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