Co-Creative Watering

In yesterday’s co-creative gardening class, we veered off into a quick-yet-substantial side conversation about watering plants. It’s easy to forget how easy it is to ask the plant itself how much water it needs. We make all kinds of educated guesses about how much water to give a plant, and then we hem and haw about whether it needs more or less — or we dump water on the soil and walk away, assuming we’ve done our job. It’s a whole different experience to ask the plant if it needs water and, if so, how much, and then provide it what it asks for.

After class, I asked the Deva of a curry plant that I recently picked up at an herb sale if I’d given it too much water (as I suspected I had), and the Deva said, “No.” (I was truly surprised.) I then asked some more probing questions and discovered that the plant needs to be in a larger pot — and soon! So, before the end of this week I will transplant that root-bound herb into a larger pot, giving it just what it asked for. And here’s the kicker — it took far less of my personal energy and resources to have that two-minute “conversation” with the plant than to stew for hours (or days!) about whether I’d drowned that beloved, fragrant new addition to my home.