GREEN NEW & VIEWS
Embodied Knowing in the Garden
BY TAYLOR LOGSDON I have felt drawn to the cultivation and care of plants since I was a child. Over time, my interest has taken me from curiosity to practice — from backyard experiments to working on farms, market gardening, and eventually working as a professional gardener and landscaper. Along the way, I’ve studied soil science, plant nutrient needs, and the complexity of the soil food web. I find these subjects endlessly fasci - nating. In gardening, there is more than one lifetime of learning. And yet, if we become too focused on modern tools of measurement and classification, we can miss something larger. Academic ways of knowing alone can leave us unsure and hesitant, stuck in our heads. We can fall into a kind of gardener’s analysis paralysis, fearing that our actions will do more harm than good. Thankfully, there is another, more intimate way of knowing our gardens that is direct and acces- sible — one that predates soil tests, nutrient recommendations, and abstract measurements. For millennia, our ancestors relied on their senses , honed through experience and by dependence on land and living things for daily sus- tenance. Though largely forgotten in our culture, this way of knowing remains part of our inheritance: a body that recognizes healthy eco - systems and the conditions that support them. Our senses, refined and calibrated by experience and inherited knowledge, are among our finest instruments for reading the health of the land and our gardens. We feel the relief of a hydrating rain after a dry summer spell, the gentle goodness of morning and evening sun on our skin, and the vibrancy of leaves emerging in spring. In an age of expertise, specialization, and abstraction, relying on the senses invites
us back into our bodies and into relationship with the natural world. My own knowing of this kind began as a child when I somehow got the notion to grow a bean from the neighbor’s farm field. I didn’t re - alize at the time these were soybeans and might not offer the culinary experience I was familiar with. Regardless, I went out to the field in the fall, collected a bean from the dried plants awaiting harvest, and gave it a name. I brought little Beany home and planted it in a pot filled with compost from the backyard, then set it in our sunroom window. When that bean sprouted, it felt like a small miracle. I watched with joy as its first leaf sprouted, then its second, steadily growing into a
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Misty Kuceris, Reiki Master & Pathways Columnist
32—PATHWAYS—Spring 26
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