Reviving Lost Love Stories: Ancestral Plants Near & Far
Love for plants lives in my bones, in my DNA, but I feel the absence of family stories to go with it.
Today, let's turn our minds to ancestral plants. For me, this connection began with the realization that plants are in my name. Farnham–my last name–means Fern Home. My middle name is my paternal grandmother’s birth name, Lindholm, Swedish for “linden tree home.” The reason my ancestors went by those names is lost to time. There is no family name lore passed down from generation to generation, just the name itself. I know that Lindholm is a chosen name—my ancestors five generations back chose it when they emigrated from Sweden to the United States. Yet no one in my family knows why they renamed the family after a linden tree.
Also on my mind is a recent experience rejuvenating some quilts my great-grandmother Farnham stitched together by hand. She sewed the tops, but no one ever added the batting (the quilt stuffing), the backing, or the binding to keep it all in. The quilt tops sat in a box my entire lifetime, if not longer. They collected stains over the years. They’re not pristine specimens of the craft, but you can tell there’s so much love in them. My favorite is painstakingly hand-stitched. This likely required months; maybe years of work. I couldn’t bear to have them locked away any longer, so a few months back, I paid a local quilter to finish them for me. She completed the job last week, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. Why do I mention the quilts? My favorite of the two has a daffodil pattern. The daffodil is my favorite flower. My great-grandmother passed away when I was very young, so I don’t have many memories of her, but our shared love for daffodils gives me a connection to her. I can wrap myself in the quilt and feel the plant love along with the family love that still lives in its fibers.
Love for plants lives in my bones, in my DNA, but I feel the absence of family stories to go with it. I learned to garden from my mother and grandmother (who also loved daffodils), but there’s nothing to tell me what it was about ferns and linden trees that meant so much to my family they took their name. Spending hours or days with hands in the dirt, maybe they never anticipated that their descendants would live in a time when many people go for days or weeks without encountering or thinking about the plants that give us life and breath.
The stories are gone, but the plants themselves are still around, descendants or relatives of the plants whose names my ancestors carried. This year, I am planting ferns in my yard and daffodil bulbs descended from my grandmother’s flowers. We do not have linden trees in Alaska, but there are linden trees in Sweden that are hundreds and even thousands of years old. If I traveled to Sweden, I might sit under one of the same linden trees my ancestors loved. I don’t have stories about my family’s connection to plants, but I can imagine them. I imagine an ancestor whose home was so surrounded by ferns that it became a landmark. I picture a linden tree stretching its limbs over a family home for generations, so beloved and missed in the new world that my ancestors took its name when they migrated. Particles of air those plants breathed circulate in my lungs. I wrap myself in the daffodil quilt and let my body remember what my mind cannot.
This week, I want you to dig for a plant story in your memory. Do you have plants in your name? Were there any plants revered in your ancestral homeland? If not, is there a plant that was or is special to a family member? Do a little internet research—what is unique about the plant? Are there any of its relatives near you? What does the plant’s character show you about your family and its history? What can this plant teach you about yourself? Does this plant’s presence make you feel more connected to your ancestral past? Consider bringing one home to live in your yard.
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P.S. Want to learn more about plant intelligence or awareness? Here are some of my favorite books on the topic, all written for non-scientists like me:
The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence, a collection of essays and poems edited by John C. Ryan, Patrícia Vieira, and Monica Gagliano
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate--Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard