Four Ecologies: A Guide to Growing Plants, Peace & a Calmer Planet

Why We Wrote This

You planted zinnias once, just to see if you could. They bloomed like they’d been waiting for you.

Weeks later, something softened. You started speaking more kindly—to the barista, to your reflection, to the part of you still afraid of spring.

You didn’t call it healing. You called it watering. You didn’t call it boundaries. You moved the plant into more light. It just needed rhythm, a bit of structure, and someone to believe it would try.

You were the same. You are the same.

This book grew the way all real things do—out of compost, curiosity, and seasons you didn’t ask for but learned to move through anyway. From the soft purple haze of crown vetch blooming too early near the ditch, to the horsechestnut trees standing like old gods beside the white pines in your neighborhood park.

You learned to watch the wind move through the top canopy, to recognize late July by the smell of tomato leaves, to let the dried coneflowers keep their stalks standing in fall so they could wear their snowfall like a little hat all winter. There was something sacred in all of it. Something wordless and generous and true.

This isn’t a gardening book. It’s a devotional for anyone who doesn’t know what to fix, but knows they need to tend. A way to practice being alive through the language of soil and season and the quiet grace of things that keep growing anyway.

For the ones who remember they are part of the ecosystem.

For the moments when your breath catches at a seedling you didn’t plant.

For the life that’s already reaching through the cracks in your concrete and saying, “Still here.”

Print it and mark up the margins. Leave it in your basket next to the pruning shears, or on your nightstand between the lamp and the peppermint salve. It belongs in use, not on a shelf.

This book is made of green things and grief, small starts and sacred messes.

And it belongs to you.