Rooted & Restless

Karla Brodie grew up with her hands in the earth. Her great-grandmother had a chamomile lawn you could smell when you stepped on it. Her grandmother let things run riot. By the time Karla had her own bedroom, it was full of plants. She gave each one her attention the way some people give attention to people.

I came to Karla because Olive Bieringa had mentioned her — as someone who practises ecosomatics in the most ordinary way, without the theory, just the life. I wanted to understand how a person genuinely rooted in the natural world experienced grief differently. What I found was a conversation that kept turning back to me, to my own estrangement from the living world, to the synthetic mind I had been handed at birth and had only recently begun to question.

Karla is a gardener, a yoga and meditation teacher, a practitioner of Ayurveda. She tends worm farms. She saves seeds. She takes cuttings from every garden she visits, which means her garden is an archive of friendships, visits, and people who are no longer nearby, or no longer living.

The conversation

On growing up inside the green world

When I ask Karla about her earliest memories of plants, she doesn't describe a single moment. She describes a lineage. Her great-grandfather on his knees on a chamomile lawn. Her grandmother's garden, overgrown and generous. When she studied Ayurveda, she had no human study partners. So she used plants instead.

This is ecosomatics before it had a name. The body reading itself through the body of the forest. The idea that you can know something in your cells before you know it in your mind.

On alone as all one

Karla says this with the weight of someone who has actually felt it in the body — the shift from contraction to expansion, from the loneliness of the self to the companionship of the ecosystem. It's the same shift that Olive Bieringa's ecosomatic practice tries to create through movement. Karla arrives at it through attention.

On the magnolia tree and how grief moves through seasons

A close friend of Karla's died. During the mourning period, there was a magnolia tree outside — deep in bud, not yet flowering. She looked at it one day and made a decision.

What Karla describes is a form of ecological attunement — the capacity to be held by natural rhythms rather than forcing them to hold still. The magnolia didn't speed up or slow down for her grief. And in following its tempo, she found a way through. Time as a companion. The tree as a clock that ticks at the right pace for mourning.

On decomposition as autobiography

When I ask how she moves through grief, Karla gives me an image. She and her lost friend were like two trees growing side by side. When he died, he dissolved — into flame, into stars. And she was left as timber. Heavy. Disconnected from the ground.

Karla has never attended a BodyCartography workshop. She has not read Olive Bieringa's writing on dying and decomposing as a somatic practice. She arrived at the same place through lived experience and Tibetan Buddhist meditation — through the body's own knowledge of how matter transforms.

On grieving for plants, and the grief that has no script

I tell Karla about the plant I thought was fake. I had it for three years — a pothos, unremarkable and green. I suspected it might be artificial. When it finally died, I felt a grief that surprised me with its force. And then I felt foolish for feeling it. There was nowhere to put the feeling except in the bin with the plant.

We talk about disenfranchised grief — the kind of loss that society doesn't recognise as legitimate. For plants, there is no funeral, no leave of absence, no one asking how you're doing. But this shapelessness might be exactly why it matters. A grief that has no social script has nowhere to go except into the body. And in the body, it might meet all the other grief that never had a script either.

On trees as ancestors and record-keepers

She talks about kauri trees — some over two thousand years old. Their rings hold drought years and flood years. They are not just old. They are archives. They are, she says quietly, our ancestors.

On cuttings and the social life of plants

A garden as a social network, rendered in chlorophyll. Seeds as travellers, carrying memory across distance. She's not just growing food. She's composing a living archive.

A moment

Rooted & Restless  ·  Issue 01  ·  Next: Field Notes

I grew up in a city that taught me plants were decorative at best and inconvenient at worst. I arrived in New Zealand as an alien — not just to the country, but to the entire register of living, growing, dying things that most people seem to understand intuitively. This is an account of trying to learn.

The plant I thought was plastic died on a Thursday. I had owned it for three years — a pothos, unremarkable and green, sitting on a shelf in my first Wellington apartment. I watered it sometimes. I moved it around. I suspected, genuinely, that it might be artificial. Then one day it yellowed, softened, and collapsed in the way that only real things do. And I grieved for it in a way that made no sense to anyone I told, and so I told no one.

That grief was my first real lesson in something I now think of as ecological literacy: the capacity to notice, to feel, to be affected by the living world. I had spent thirty-odd years cultivating its opposite.

I. The synthetic mind — what I was given

In the Chinese city where I grew up, plants were functional. They were herbs, ingredients, medicine — things with purposes. The body was a production machine. Intellectual achievement sat at the top of every value hierarchy. Farmers occupied a position of cultural condescension that was rarely examined and almost never challenged.

This is what I am calling the synthetic mind. It expects permanence, reads decay as failure, and approaches a living thing with a maintenance protocol rather than a capacity for attention. Synthetic fibres don't decay. Refrigerators extend foods past their natural horizon. Supermarkets erase the seasons. And inside all of this — designed into the infrastructure of how we live — is a training in the avoidance of loss.

II. Black sand — the first lesson

The first time I had what I now recognise as an ecosomatic experience, I didn't know what it was. I only knew that I was lying face-down on a beach at Piha, on the west coast of Auckland, with black volcanic sand against my cheek, and that something had shifted in a way I couldn't immediately explain.

Karla Brodie had brought me here. I was in the middle of a divorce. Everything felt provisional. I pressed my face into the sand and felt the weight of the water in it. The wave noise came in at a frequency I could feel in my chest. For about forty minutes, I forgot that I was a person with problems. The grief, the uncertainty — it did not disappear. But it changed scale. It became one thing among many things, none of which were particularly concerned with me.

I moved to Wellington shortly after. I bought fifty houseplants. I killed most of them.

III. The apprenticeship of loss

Karla watched me kill the plants with patient, affectionate concern. "It's a listening," she told me. "It's an observation. It's a witnessing. You have that so exquisitely in so many elements of your life. But when you come to nature, it was quite new."

I approached the plants with a technician's logic: input, output, problem, solution. I had no framework for the possibility that they were simply doing what plants do — changing, struggling, adapting, sometimes dying — and that none of this required my intervention to be meaningful.

I began to understand that my grief for these things was not disproportionate. It was proportionate to something I had been taught to ignore. Every plant that died in my care was carrying some of the grief I hadn't been allowed to feel for all the other things I had lost — people, places, times, a self that belonged to another city and another life. The plant was just the container that finally cracked open.

IV. On time, and what places carry

When I bought my first house, the previous owners were in their seventies. They had built the garden over forty years. The wife sat in her chair on the last day and looked at the trees she had planted — trees that were now taller than the house — and wept.

What she was weeping for was not only the garden. It was every morning she had spent in it, every season she had watched move through it, every version of herself that had stood at that window or knelt in that soil. The garden was an archive of a life. And she was being separated from it.

I moved in and the trees were still there. I didn't know them. But I found myself caring for them in a way I couldn't entirely account for. As if I had inherited not just the trees but some part of her relationship with them. As if grief, like seeds, could pass from one person to another through the medium of a garden.

V. What the supermarket does

The supermarket is the synthetic mind's natural habitat. Inside it, time is suspended. There are no seasons, no localities, no cycles. Only the permanent present of the refrigerated aisle. Death is managed offstage, at a distance.

Karla told me about indigenous people in the Amazon who have no refrigerators — who go out each day to gather what they will eat that day and no more. A different relationship with time and trust: that what you need will be there when you need it, that you do not need to stockpile for a scarcity that may never arrive.

I recognised myself in the opposite image: the full fridge, the bulk-bought provisions, the hoarding instinct that pandemic living had intensified. I am preparing for a future scarcity, always. This too is a form of not being able to let things die — the refusal to trust in cycles, the insistence on holding on.

VI. The slow de-synthesizing

I still have plants I don't fully understand. I still catch myself reading care guides and then ignoring what the plant is actually telling me. But something has shifted. When a leaf yellows now, I don't always immediately try to correct it. Sometimes I just watch.

I have a merino wool jumper with a hole in the elbow. I have had it for six years. When I first noticed the hole, I felt the familiar synthetic-mind alarm. But then I thought about Karla's trousers, worn for thirty years, holes at the knees, still loved. The hole is not damage. The hole is evidence. It means the jumper was really here, really used, really part of a life.

Rooted & Restless  ·  Field Notes  ·  Next: Issue 02

Olive Bieringa is a dancer who has come to believe that the most radical thing a body can do is learn to compost itself. Her practice — ecosomatics — starts from a simple premise: that the body is not separate from the ecosystem it inhabits, and that learning to feel this fully is one of the most urgent tasks of our moment.

I first encountered Olive's work through a description of her performance series Resisting Extinction, in which audiences gather at shorelines and riverbanks to practise dying together. The phrase stopped me. Not the dying — I had been thinking about grief for months. It was the word "practise." As if dying were a skill. As if it required rehearsal. As if the reason we are so catastrophically bad at grieving the living world is that we have lost the bodily capacity for it — and that capacity needs to be cultivated, like any other.

Olive is also a certified practitioner of Body-Mind Centering, a somatic modality that uses the body's own tissues — organs, fluids, bones, nerves — as sites of knowledge rather than mere mechanisms. She is a doctoral candidate at Uniarts Helsinki. She runs ecosomatic intensives in forests outside Oslo.

The conversation

On somatics as an already-ecological practice

What I hear in this is a refusal of preciousness. Ecosomatics is not a new discipline arrived from outside. It is an extension of attention — the same awareness that somatic practitioners bring to a knee joint or a breath pattern, now extended to the tree outside the window, the soil underfoot, the quality of air in a particular place at a particular moment.

On the body as host, and the host as body

On teaching bodies how to die

On grief as an ecosomatic practice

On Umwelt — the city as a perceptual world

I ask about the concept of Umwelt — the idea, developed by biologist Jakob von Uexküll, that each organism inhabits its own subjective perceptual world. I want to know how she thinks about the human Umwelt in an urban environment.

On the political stakes of dying well

This is perhaps the most important thing she says in our whole conversation. We have built an entire culture of environmental communication around hope and inspiration — around the images of what we might save, rather than what we are losing. The consequence is a kind of emotional anaesthesia: people technically aware of the ecological crisis but who have not felt it in their bodies, and who therefore cannot sustain the kind of action the crisis actually requires.

On being from here

A moment

Rooted & Restless  ·  Issue 02  ·  Next: Issue 03

Vicky is not a theorist, and not a researcher. She is simply someone who has grown a lot of plants, and in caring for them has gradually understood certain things. The kinds of things that academic papers can't quite articulate.

Our conversation began with a very concrete problem — the mould on my plant's soil, and my worry that I had done something wrong. Vicky said gently that mould already exists in the air; it just grows more easily when you give it food — like the cooled apple-cooking water I had poured onto the soil. She didn't blame me, but she didn't pretend it didn't matter either. She said: clear it away, and let the soil dry out a bit.

That approach — neither overprotective nor neglectful, learning to find a balance — became the undertone of the whole conversation.

The conversation

Plants don't need to think, but they keep getting more beautiful

This reminded me of what Karla Brodie said: plants are a mirror, letting you see how you relate to the world. But Vicky was pointing in another direction — plants aren't a mirror, they're a counter-question. They ask: why do you think you need to think in order to be alive?

Leaves are a plant's face — you can read what's wrong

Vicky said she has an intuition about which plant needs watering — sometimes she already knows before she's touched the soil. Then she said something that made me stop:

I thought of my pothos — the plant I kept as if it were fake for three years. It never spoke, never changed, until the day it died. If I had learned earlier to read its leaves, to treat them as a face, perhaps I would have known sooner that it was real.

Reading a plant from its leaves is also reading a body from its skin — this is the starting point for the whole practice of ecosomatics: the outer state is the inner language, only we don't know how to translate it.

I feel a plant's pain — more directly than I feel a person's

I shared something with Vicky: every time I have to cut a flower stem, I feel a real, physical pain in my body. Not a metaphor — a bodily sensation. Then I told the slightly uncanny story of buying flowers for an Indian ritual, needing 108 petals, and the flower's leaves spontaneously falling to the ground as I closed the door — exactly 109.

I can't explain this. But throughout this entire research project, every time I speak to someone with a deep connection to plants, they mention some kind of inexplicable sensitivity. Vicky said her largest plant died around the same time her great-aunt fell critically ill. She had dreamed of the illness, and then the dream came true.

She said: you can't help but believe that this coincidence exists.

Plant abuse — the wordless, struggleless victimhood

This question touched the most fundamental unease in my whole research: we hold all the power in a relationship that cannot refuse us. A plant cannot leave, cannot protest, cannot knock on your door when you ignore it. All it can do is change the colour of its leaves, and wait for you to finally learn to read its face.

Vicky said: it's fragile because it can't refuse you. But that doesn't mean you can't see it.

Coexistence, not a tool — I can't use a plant as an energy dustbin

Vicky said she thinks the best approach is: let it be a companion, coexist together. Don't turn it into a tool, and don't turn it into your child — just a kind of equal, quiet shared dwelling.

The colonial history of plants — a class hierarchy in the flower market

This connects to something I keep returning to in my research: when we put plants inside market logic, they stop being living things and become perishable goods. And the cost of that thinking is that we lose the capacity to sense plant life — because commodities don't need to be sensed, only bought and discarded.

We eat them now; they'll eat us later

I stayed with this for a long time. It reminded me of the image Karla used about decomposition, and of Olive Bieringa's dying and decomposing practice. We are all part of the cycle of matter; we are simply too accustomed to seeing ourselves as the centre of that cycle, and forget that we are also food for plants.

This is not pessimism. This is a genuine equality — and the moment in my ecological grief research that moved me most: when we are willing to put ourselves back into the cycle, mourning and fear become something different. Perhaps a form of gratitude.

Get the roots right, and a plant is very hard to kill

This made me think of the migration metaphor I had been working on with Karla: a seed in new soil needs to adapt, even mutate, but its core DNA doesn't disappear. I left China, came to New Zealand, and lost much of my intuitive knowledge of plants and the natural world — but perhaps that deep layer, the part that lets me see petals falling to the floor and feel it as something like clairvoyance, was always there.

It just needed a more humid environment to slowly grow back.

A moment

Rooted & Restless  ·  Issue 03  ·  Taiwan plant conversation series

Deborah Crowe has spent forty years photographing the places where plants push back against the city — weeds splitting pavement, mushrooms colonising walls, flowers seeding themselves in concrete gaps. Her photo-collage work splices these images into architecture, producing environments that are simultaneously utopian and unsettling: what the city might look like if the plants won.

I came to Deborah because her ongoing series Outlook — a decade-long visual diary of plant encounters in Auckland's urban environment — felt like a different entry point into the question I had been circling in all my other interviews: what does it mean to pay attention to plants in a world that has been systematically trained not to? Where Karla Brodie arrives at this through gardening, and Olive Bieringa through somatic practice, Crowe arrives at it through the eye of an artist who has spent four decades learning to stop at the things other people walk past.

She had been through a period of illness before we spoke, and she told me that our conversation had helped her reconnect with her practice — "a really good way of me to help me reconnect with my work." I thought about that afterwards. The interview as a form of ecological attention. The conversation as a kind of cutting, passed between people.

The conversation

On seeing with intent — the city as material

I asked Crowe what she actually sees when she walks through Auckland — what other people might walk past. She reached for John Berger.

She described the city as material — in the same way that a weaver thinks of threads. She trained as a weaver at Glasgow School of Art before moving to Aotearoa, and that framework has stayed embedded in everything she makes: "Everything for me feels like the act of weaving things together. It feels like many many strands of things getting interlaced to become whole. I think that's how I think about the city."

Time, she said, is also a material. "Having time pass and thinking about things feels a bit like a material." This is not a metaphor — it is a description of how she works. The Outlook series began in 2016 as a response to changes in her Karangahape Road neighbourhood, and has continued across a decade as a kind of visual diary: part observation, part politics, part emotional release.

On ecological grief — the swing between hopes and fears

I told her about the conversation I had been having across these interviews about ecological grief — the sense of loss when environments change or disappear. She recognised it immediately.

Her series Don't Expect the Future to Look Like the Past emerged from exactly this oscillation — made in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, after reading extensively about eco-anxiety. She had subscribed for years to a newsletter called Gen Dread (later renamed The Unthinkable), dedicated to helping people live with the grief that comes from ecological loss.

This is a different position from Olive Bieringa's insistence on the priority of mourning. Where Bieringa argues that we must grieve before we can act, Crowe suggests that holding both grief and hope simultaneously — making art that is simultaneously "triggering" and "cheerful" — may itself be a sustainable ecological stance. Not resolution, but cohabitation with the tension.

On plants as memory — whakapapa and the lineage of cuttings

I mentioned what I had heard from other interviewees — that people often feel embarrassed by grief for plants, because there is no social script for it. Crowe took this somewhere I had not expected.

A neighbour, she told me, has a tomato plant that has been in his family for eighty or ninety years. Each year they take new cuttings and give them to people, so that it spreads and spreads. The plant is not one plant — it is a distributed archive of a family's history, encoded in biology rather than paper.

On weeds — the politics of the non-plant

Her public art work Nature Wins! — which covered the Freyberg Steps in central Auckland with enormous images of nasturtiums, clover, and bee-supporting plants during the COVID lockdown — began as an act of what she calls "visual rewilding." But underneath the cheerfulness was a careful political argument.

The taxonomy of plants — what is cultivated, what is wild, what is weed — is not neutral. It reflects what human systems value and what they discard. Crowe's work keeps returning to this: the plants that push through concrete are not just surviving, they are refusing a classification. They are, in her images, colonising what humans have built — reclaiming, rewilding, insisting.

On mānuka — the quiet plant that shelters others

The Mānuka Dreaming series — large, luminous collages of the scrubby coastal plant — came from a period she spent in the countryside, walking daily among mānuka bushes. She described the plant with a specificity that felt earned rather than aesthetic.

The mānuka, she said, is a plant that provides before it is noticed — that makes possible the growth of other, more fragile things beneath its canopy. It struck me that this is also a description of her own practice: the slow accumulation of Outlook images, year after year, building a perceptual archive that makes other people's noticing possible.

On the ideal world — a giant glass house

She also quoted Alan Weisman's The World Without Us: "In the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house. Our houses." The world without us, she said, is not gloomy in Weisman's telling — it is a world where ice cracks concrete in New York, weeds push through, forests return to Chernobyl. "Nature probably will always win. Hopefully we hope. We hope. But we're doing quite a lot to try to block that."

A moment

Rooted & Restless  ·  Issue 04  ·  Auckland urban ecology series