“Stay curious,” wrote Ellen Meloy. “Know where you are—your biological address. Get to know your neighbors—plants, creatures, who lives there, who died there, who is blessed, cursed, what is absent or in danger or in need of your help.” Meloy wrote from a desert landscape very different from that of what’s now called coastal North Carolina, but her imperative applies equally to this landscape. And it is significant that plants are first in her list of neighbors. To imagine a world without plants is to imagine a world without itself—we might be hard pressed to describe, exactly, all of the plants we live alongside, but their absence would be first devastating and then deadly.
If instead we imagine the world full of and alive with plants, happily, there are plenty of examples to look to. Although many native plant communities are threatened or have already been decimated—by unchecked development, by the effects of the climate crisis—some still thrive. And to pay attention to a plant, especially a plant living in an ecoregion in which it evolved, is to be rewarded.
The eight poems included here are the result of eight poets’ attention. In spring 2025, these writers toured the New Hanover County Arboretum with master gardener Sherrel Bunn, and attended a talk on native plants by master gardener Karen Sorenson. Each then selected a plant native to coastal North Carolina, researched it, observed it, and made a poem with and for it. The poems are now installed at the arboretum, near the plants they describe. This public poetry project will be available to view all summer.
Approaching the set of poems as a garden in miniature, I find it expands to vast proportions—from contemplative lyrics to family narratives to poems of praise to poems written from the plant’s perspective, each one lifting up and engaged in conversation with a plant neighbor we are lucky to be near.
—Anna Lena Phillips Bell, April 2025, Wilmington, NC
