Sacrificial Planting
— Marta Regn
Behind the house, my mother is experimenting, running tests, pressing her thumbs into the sweet, swollen flesh of cherry tomatoes. Red-orange, yellow juice trickles down her wrists. She places the burst of skin and seeds on a slab of rock she’s hauled up the hill or tilled up in the garden. It’s all an offering for the box turtles. A feast. She’s tried sliced tomatoes, mulberries, sometimes leafy greens, though her hypothesis is that the turtles prefer bright things. Easy to detect with their unusually good eyesight. The nature of turtles is something she has meticulously observed, telling me of their propensity to keep within a perimeter, their solitary nature. Perhaps their taste for my mother’s vivid gifts is not mere preference but privation as eastern box turtles are declining in Virginia. Habitat-loss the leading culprit, food scarcity a close second.
My mother can tell you all the foods I loved most as a child; not just what they were but how I liked them prepared and the methods with which I preferred to eat them. “You liked dipping.” She says this always with her fingers pinched like they’re inside a sock puppet. Her hand motions up and down, a hen picking at her feed. She means dipping things like homemade french fries into homemade ketchup: potatoes from the garden into tomatoes from the garden. I recall this story of dippers-into-dip as she tells me how the box turtles take their snacks: on flat rocks in the shade as opposed to in beds of sun-soaked grass. Always in the morning.
I don’t know if she is conducting this experiment because she is a scientist, an environmentalist by training, or a mother. It might be impossible to divorce these parts of her. It would be like a forced amputation of both her arms. (She said once if my brother or I were to die in a car crash she wouldn’t be able to go on, and she shared a similar sentiment about the microplastics present in every waterway, and again when a bat with white-nose syndrome was recorded for the first time in Virginia. “I can’t live with this,” were her words).
Her studies seem always in service to wild, needful creatures. Like so many mothers, these acts of service are often at her own expense. The sunroom at the house’s far, southern end is where she starts seeds for the garden, and this starting of seeds is the way she keeps time in her head. Like someone might mark memories in reference to important holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries, she lives by the growing calendar, recalling seasons by their cycles of frost and thaw. My memories of her are always in the garden, where she would retreat after work to dig away at the day (often saying that weeding is cheaper than therapy.) She once thought of cutting down the towering red cedar in the side yard because it blocked certain angles of light from flooding the sunroom: a way to start more seeds, to plant and till more, to buoy her soul. But the berries of the eastern red cedar, the foggy blue fruit stippling the trees’ feathered limbs, are high in lipids. “They’re like fast-food for birds,” she told me, rich in the fat and sugar scarcely found by resident songbirds in the wintertime. “Fat during winter,” she said, “is more important.” More important than what, though, she didn’t specify. But I, as her daughter, knew this wasn’t simple surrendering but intentional generosity. So she didn’t cut the cedar tree, and it still stands today, shading the sun porch all afternoon.
What she will do with the information she gathers about the box turtles, I do not know. Plant more cherry tomatoes, perhaps: the best she can offer in the face of their decline. We learned recently this practice has a name: sacrificial planting. An article from a gardening website we both like described it as a way to weather inevitable loss, protect your harvest from the heists of hungry critters. It was offered as a method of getting one’s own needs met. But I, as her daughter, recognized the mothering in growing more than you need, planting more than you alone can eat, so that there’s always enough to give away.
Read more from Issue No. 36 or share on Twitter.