Wildfire season has begun and so far I’ve been ok working full days while wearing a mask. Not sure though if I could do this for weeks at a time. My eyes burn—but they recover.
At times I’m in awe at my own new resilience to outdoor conditions. It’s like I’m descended from crazy pioneers or something. It wasn’t like this though for many years. My throat and tongue would have been swelling up as I choked for air.
This new normal comes with calm and I feel strong. I don’t know myself, but I like this person a lot.
These are my days now as I reflect back on when and how my non-traditional career path started, where it went, and what I want now. All I’ve wanted was some personal autonomy, and well, here we are…
The last few posts about work this last year have been intentionally opaque. I’ve had A LOT of alone time to think, and have stared with intention at my career trajectory to better understand where I’ve been, where I’m going, and what I rapidly grew through.
I don’t recognize myself still in much of this, but I’m getting used to it. Some friends might joke I’ve been driven by something, maybe a demon.
All I can say is that freedom has been at the core. A desire for it can be quite powerful.
Growing slowly, with more strength and stability, is more my style. But the career push had to happen quickly. I’ve wanted to catch up to peers for a long time, but now, since I came into this late, I have so many friends who are younger than me. I’ve learned to see advantages in this.
Sometimes people think I’m younger than I am lol. But I also learn a lot by better examining how my younger friends see the work of horticulture and plants differently than I do.
This kind of confluence is just my sort of thing. It’s where I like to linger and enter into discussions. It’s where I sit and observe.
A mentor—who prefers considering himself my friend—intervened last winter. My nose had been down to the ground, mostly due to exhaustion, and he pulled me up and away to look at things from above. The change in perspective was helpful. I saw that I’ve been thinking I’m still in daily illness survival mode, but I don’t need to be as I’m safe now. The professional decisions I’ve made over the last few years have been sound. I’m strong and just need to keep going.
Too often, I still linger in the past. I ruminate on the past. I feel like I’m fighting, or that I have to fight. There’s no reason to fight with anyone about anything, but it’s what my nervous system has considered ‘normal’. The takeaway was that I needed to be in the present, lean into my teammates at work, and trust the process.
I’m currently learning how to trust. I’ve only known hypervigilance, emotional withdrawal, and the simultaneous fears of betrayal and rejection well. Yet, somehow, during the last few years, good people have surrounded and protected me more and more from these habits. I’m different now.
This conversation, along with others, helped me to better understand that it’s time to envision a future, and to be open to it. I’ve only tried this once, when I was 18 or so, and I’m timid and terrified.
But this is my life and my career now, and I’m embracing it all.
So, as we prepare for fall and winter at work, I’ll be rededicating myself to a version of what brought me into horticulture in the first place. Little Prince of Oregon and school both have taught me so much more discipline. Just since last fall, I’m stronger physically, mentally, and emotionally, but I will add, yes, of course I still very much miss small specialty nurseries and working at them.
When I go to parties or Open Gardens, others ask me the same things, “How is your job now? Do you miss Cistus? Do you miss Secret Garden Growers? What are you actually doing now?”
This has been a constant this summer and I’ve said various things. It was an honor to have learned from Sean that I had skills I didn’t fully understand. He taught me a lot. Pat continued to nurture my interests and I grew more. But I was kind of a delicate person and employee. I did not handle a bully at all well at one job, and I still have nightmares about that situation. Managing others made me frustrated in ways I didn’t understand and didn’t want to experience. My compass was off. Not everyone will look out for you, and there comes a time when exhaustion can take over when dealing with a friend in need. I could be annoying.
So do I like a more regimented environment? Yes. Do I like a business with very strong anti-bullying rules? Yes. Am I happy working with a lot of structure around me? Turns out, I do. Do I miss the wide variety of hard-to-find plants and talking to designers and people wanting to plant up a beautiful vision? Of course I do.
But I really needed structure and some space to loosen myself up a bit by feeling safe. That’s what I’ve discovered about myself in all of this. I’ve had the safe space to think long and hard about horticulture. Other projects outside of work brought me deeper into my childhood, and what I grew up around. The plant nursery and small farm traditions of my hometown during my childhood influenced my young little heart and soul a great deal.
I’ve come to realize my dream was to have a marriage where I’d work land together with someone else, and that vision was forced on my first marriage. But like many others I know in Hort who are close to my age, there probably always was the romantic dream of meeting someone I’d garden with, but I never fully dreamed of owning a nursery, but some part of me likely does, I just can’t allow it to exist. It would hurt too much.
But I think it’s a romantic vision many of us hold somewhere locked down inside of us. I’m living in the present now though. I’ve come to accept I really enjoy growing crops—large and small—of ornamental plants. That’s my daily jam.
This is just my twist on family tradition. The most realistic way to do this, and earn a living, is simply to work for a larger business.
And so for now, I’m full-scale hardcore wholesale plants lol. My responsibilities will be shifting again at work, and I’m ok with that. I’m ready for the new challenges ahead. I’ve had time to process this crazy journey, and I’m present. I listen to my emotions, but am practical.
I have my work at the nursery, and there are side projects I pursue at home, since, well, I’m driven and ambitious and as my mother would say, “Not dead yet.”
This is better than being sick all of the time. It’s all still so new to me—especially the part about better embracing uncertainty. Mixing this all up with a myriad of possibilities—it boggles my mind.
In illness, I grew far away from myself. I suppose I protected the best parts, but maybe I just built her a prison, or a tower to hide her away. While I now have officially outgrown the survival tools I knew, I’m still learning how to navigate safely with new ones.
Boundaries and working too much are my new best friends lol. And when I want to run and hide, I write my way through it to neutralize the urge.
Luckily my roots stretch deep, I’m planted well, and I know additional growth is coming. A new season is around the corner, and I’m open—quietly, calmly, open.
The lack of panic and complete stillness at times is still off-putting, but it’s growing on me. I don’t have to suffer to be creative. That’s been another lesson. And silence doesn’t have to mean something terrible is going to happen soon, or that I’m being punished.
There are still ghosts of the past, stories once told to create meaning. There are the fantasies emblazoned with personal emotions hidden and buried. My inner walls and interior barriers are cluttered. The undone garden at home is a physical representation of this inner world. Both are currently being dismantled. It is exhausting, but freeing too. I already feel lighter.
Somedays I’m amazed just realizing that for the first time in my adult life, I could simply pick up and move away. I’ve never had that kind of freedom. I’ve never thought that thought. I have no plans to do anything, but it feels good, expansive.
The last four years I’ve rapidly expanded, and I’m reinventing my entire life landscape, and like anyone cultivating something, I need the best tools, skills, and a team for this. So to help myself, I help others, and have enjoyed texting with and spending time with my favorite former classmates who I hope will continue to be friends in the years ahead.
Rowan is in their early 20s and is the current summer intern at the Leach Botanical Garden here in Portland. (Plant explorer, botanist, writer and teacher Lilla Leach was a childhood hero of mine. I think I’ve written that somewhere on this site in the past.)
So while young Rowan grew up in Texas, their parents are from South Africa. In school we both realized we share that quirky and complicated bicultural understanding of ourselves. We have fun hanging out with one another despite the age difference. Rowan is an old soul, and I, at times, might be part 12-year-old mischievous boy.
So we usually have great conversations—and plenty of laughs too.
We recently spent two Saturdays together. I took them to some HPSO Open Gardens, and we spent one morning at Fort Vancouver—just across the Columbia River in Washington state.
Established in 1825 by the Hudson Bay Company, Scottish botanist David Douglas arrived there on April 20th of that same year to catalog new plants. He used the fort as his headquarters while he explored the PNW. He was another historic hero of mine.
Rowan and I walked and talked about Douglas, and other cross-cultural moments of our own as we walked the grounds—a place where many cultures converged. We watched a Native American father and his daughter as they explored the fort together, walking ahead of us to Maya Lin’s Confluence Project site, the Vancouver Land Bridge. They smiled at one another and laughed excitedly when they saw their tribe included in the installation. He took photos of her standing beside the signage.
Rowan and I talked of many things that day. And their garden was looking incredible.
After that, at my friend Theo’s house, Rowan was able to indulge in taking lots of photos of fuchsia species and cultivars. It was quite an education, and I deeply enjoyed sharing that experience with them.
I was also able to point out a special plant in the garden. It had come from a seedling I’d grown and named at Cistus.
During my first autumn at the nursery (2016) Evan had come to visit and walk the greenhouses with me to show me where they’d collected seeds when they’d been the propagator.
I had one little envelope for random open-pollinated abutilons and the seed for this plant was in it. For a few years the seeds sat in the fridge, and then Sean green lit growing a batch. This plant came from that first crop we grew.
As I write this, I’m listing to Chopin in what I refer to as my Ann Cave—the old converted porch and pantry where a wall was removed at some point to make the space for one large room. The sun is shining through the living willow arbor, and its unpruned branches are wiggling shadows on the floor in front of me. They sway to the music as the fan oscillates and Alfie the cat cleans himself beside me. I’m happy.
Up until now I’ve not been strategic—but it will be key now in a great deal of what I’ll be doing as I return to working with seeds in a new way. I’ve fought for the light, survived difficult conditions, and thankfully thrived when others kindly stepped in to tweak the conditions I was living in. I’m grateful.
I know I’m hardy. I’ve lived through many freeze responses. I guess the opposite of that now is to simply remain warm and open, but that will take time. More peace will come. Pints of butter pecan ice cream and kaffee und kuchen can only get me so far.
I’m in murky safe water, and will rise to the surface slowly, cultivating the fire burning in my chest with grit.
I want to have dirty hands and feet, to feel the sun on my skin, to breathe, to sense the raw energy of ideas, and to write them down. I want to let emotions bubble up, then later feel that restorative feeling of a day lived very much in my power. I want to curl up, feel safe, held in love, and be happy as the woman I am, no longer defined by so many limits. Limitless.
Ann Loves Plants 
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