One of my strongest core memories is of me going to local plant nurseries with my mom. We’d go in spring - right as the midwest winter abated and the triumph of green over grey was inevitable. Having worked at a florist in her college days, my mom is a gifted gardener with an eye for color in leaves and a penchant for varied blossoms. As she’d shop for coleus and marigolds, I’d traipse through the aisles, taking in the humid musk of the greenhouse and the kaleidoscopes of plant trays. I’d help her assemble a haul of several trays which we’d promptly transplant into beds in the front and back yards of my parents’ house. As life experiences go, it’s hard to beat time with loved ones or time outside. Both - I think any aversion to gardening never stood a chance.

In my adolescence my chief hobbies were baseball and boy scouts. I was fortunate to play at a bevy of fields in my hometown, and I preferred the ones lined with towering pines. I’ve always had a discriminating snout, and the scent of pine sap holds a firm seat at the top of my favorite smells list. On the scouting side, I was blessed with scores of opportunities to hike and camp across America - seeing wealths of prairie flowers and trees during local camping weekends, and otherworldy cacti and aspen as far as New Mexico. In an age of relentless change and the discomfort it stirs, I was drawn to the molassine drip of nature’s growth, paced so steady you can doubt it even happens.

In college I kept no plants, but I did have access to a greenhouse and an arboretum on campus. I went for many runs through the groves, and took opportunities to tour the full greenhouse, but I never sowed my knowledge of plant biology in a course. On the day my family dropped me off, my father left me with the classic, “Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.” Indeed, learning to learn has proven my most useful skill beyond matriculation, and so I took up plants as a hobby. As I think they say, the best time to learn to plant a tree was twenty years ago - the next best time is today.

After graduation, my first foray into plant ownership was a calendar of succulents courtesy of a birthday gift. As a kid I’d kept an aloe plant successfully - so successfully that one became more than a dozen, though they’d all lifecycled before I left for college. In my courtyard apartment, whose dim lighting was eclipsed by the dimness of the resident, my succulents didn’t fare so well. They became eldritch, etoliated creatures whose images were fit only for the preamble of a book on keeping plants (for those with “skin” thumbs, yet to green). Not proud of my record with them, I gave the star of the bunch to a friend and tossed the rest before I moved to Colorado at the dawn of the pandemic.

Out west I fell even more in love with trees. At the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder lies on the threshold of several distinct biomes and is coveted town for countless reasons. In a day I could spend hours gawking at the majesty of pines and aspen on a hike until breaking the treeline, then enjoy an afternoon marveling at the flowers and shrubs at the edges of the plains and prairie biomes of my childhood. September magified the mosaics on the peaks with the change of season - the death rattles of the aspen quaking in the wind as their leaves pause at a resplendant yellow framed against the steady evergreens that dominate. It’s against this backdrop that I learned to appreciate diversity as I do. To me, pines and aspen share only