I wish I had a garden, to be able to wake up in the morning and observe a steady process moving in a good direction. Small sprouts born slowly out of seemingly worthless dirt followed by stems and leaves and finally blooms, unhurriedly extending their dazzling petals towards the sun. I would slow down too and pause eventually, to stare at growth in its most natural, heartwarming form instead of looking at the advance of tanks and growing destruction. But we are all subjected to a harrowing motion of a horrible massacre getting bigger and scarier; holes are being drilled in their hearts, in my heart, larger and bloodier, the size of the prickly pain of those who are merely a few hundred kilometers away. 

Tick-tock, tick-tock, this helplessness cannot be stopped because paying attention is not enough; whatever we’re doing is not enough. There, a bit further on, the tall grasses are leaning to the ground, the wind tugging at the shrubs, the tempest is already here.

From my window I saw the clouds gathering in my neighbors’ sky and then it started, an abrupt movement, a pernicious cyclone that uprooted millions. Regular plants suddenly turned into endangered species. We ran out of our huts, attempting to catch every single seedling falling from the sky. We tried to quickly replant them all in our soil, or at least to find them provisional flower pots. I caught Natalia and her son and made sure they arrived safely to their refuge. It felt temporary at first but time flies and it’s spring now, the most distressing spring of all. 

I wish I had a garden to plant long-living perennials, to sense their stability and persistence, to see their timely blossoms and find some grounding at last. I would make some space for rare and endangered kinds as well; it would be like a tiny archive of survival. Through their filaments and coiling tendrils, plants write their tales. And if you happen to give ear to their soft whispers, you could hear familiar stories.

The majority of the flora on the Galapagos Islands arrived there by wind, ocean drift or was carried in the beaks of migrating birds. Humans, too, were responsible for bringing the seeds from lands far away. It reminds me of the route Natalia took from the threshold of her home to the house at the edge of German forest. A complex vine of trustworthy strangers made this journey possible and twined her path to safety. Two text messages before a two-day long train ride, a stop-over in Lviv, they sleep who-knows-where, really, she texts me something about good people telling them where to stay – where are they staying? Who helped them? Is it safe? Then I manage to find a car for them the next day; a woman who is driving them to the border calls me out of the blue – where to? What's the next step? Feverishly I look for a way to get them to Germany, asking, calling, begging, searching, and there it is, a miraculous bus, and equally miraculously they end up at the terminal. But then I lose them. 

I send dozens of text messages and there is no response, a single tick of an undelivered plea, an anxiety-steeped radio silence. I call some volunteers in a place I’ve never been and ask them whether they saw people I’ve never seen, frantically trying to describe them and conjure up figures out of thin air. There is not much time left; the volunteer managing the passenger’s list is getting impatient; the bus is about to leave without them. I keep staring at her WhatsApp profile photo, as if expecting it to tell me what’s happened. In the picture, Natalia and her son are posing in their vyshyvanka shirts against the background of a coniferous tree. Her white shirt blooms with beautiful, colorful embroidered flowers; this is all I know about them for now. She finally leaves me a voicemail and in my mind I am at least able to glue her picture to the sound of her radiant voice. “Vsyo harasho, Agata, all is well, we are on the bus to Dresden.” 

She finds her own way, like a seed fallen on the right ground that starts to sprout. 

Natalia writes, “Everything is quiet. Everything is stable. The silence is broken by the chiming of the clock, and I used to flinch when the clock started to chime. I was afraid it was the beginning of an air raid right before a rocket was fired. I was transported here only in body, but with my heart and soul I am still in Ukraine.” Usually the first one to console others, I have no idea what alleviates the pain of war. Nothing has ever prepared me for this, although, is that really true? After all, sometimes through plants' soft whispers, you could hear familiar stories.

The majority of the flora on Madeira got there because of migrating birds, the ocean currents, or the wind. It reminds me, my grandparents, too, were once carried by the wind of change, when World War II ended, and the borders were redrawn. Poland was still somewhat Poland despite the new contours it took on the map. If you lived outside that line, well, too bad, get your things and scooch over. They traveled West on packed trains, similar to those Natalia took, except that they were not refugees but forced migrants. Forced, as if you could be forcefully replanted to a different soil and call it your new homeland. The new soil of western Poland was now called “the recovered territories” and those lands were like an almost-empty garden; most of the previous inhabitants had been uprooted and transported West, in a very symmetric move to those who had just arrived. Those who lived here before left in a hurry, leaving behind pots, pans and well-constructed buildings filled with solid pieces of wooden furniture. Apart from these objects, they left kilometers of tree alleys in the cities and lines of apple and plum trees in the countryside. We still pick and eat these fruits today since those trees are like renegades, although currently with no formal allegiance. My grandma took care of the German grapevines that came with the new house they were offered in exchange for a home left in the East. And sometimes, while weeding her newly-planted dahlias, she would find old German cutlery buried in the ground. 

Natalia writes, “I have a big garden at home, flowers, grapevines. It all needs care. And I think that now it is time to dig up the grapevines, trim the roses, spray the trees against winter pests and whitewash them. That's the kind of work I'd be doing if there was no war. But we're here now.” Here she is, attending to her garden from a distance, yearning for nature’s closeness and tuning herself into the timetable that is hers no longer. It’s as if she sprinkled a fraction of herself on the ground when she gardened, a fraction she was now forced to abandon. 

I’m thinking of Natalia’s garden and I cry for it. And I cry for all the gardens that were abandoned but also those that tasted its owners' blood and became cemeteries in Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka…Endless fields of growth turned into spaces of extinction. They no longer whisper stories of comforting cyclicality, but of pain and heartbreaking loss.

The majority of the flora on the Greek island of Kos arrived there by wind, carried by birds or sea drift. It reminds me that a two-year-old Syrian boy was also trying to get there once; he was carried by the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The pictures of his tiny body lying motionless on a shore made rounds in the media.

I’m walking around aimlessly trying not to think about the tears I saw in another inconsolable pair of Ukrainian eyes. I wish I could turn into a tree just like that chestnut growing in front of my house, planted in German, and growing on Polish soil for the past 77 years, indifferent to the turmoil of WWII and formalities of regional belonging. If I was a tree, I would at least be able to provide shade and stability. I would take in time differently; it would flow much more slowly. I would be unmoved by the war struggles and would wait them out. And yet indifference is a form of cowardice, and I don’t want to be a coward. Time goes by so fast now that Zelenskyy’s face looks like the furrowed bark of a tree that grew old in the blink of an eye.

Natalia writes, “I don't feel good without work. And time passes slowly. I want to work on the land. I love working the land.” She misses her soil and I have nothing to provide. I can’t return her own land back to her. Besides, what does it mean to be so attached to one’s place? I don’t think I will ever know the meaning of such zealous love. Am I able to comprehend her ardent longing? All I have is a chest filled with someone else’s memories, a visceral sense of nostalgia for the lands far away across the Bug river. This nostalgia was never mine, but it was very much ingrained. I grew up dreaming of endless forests I’ve never seen, listening to my grandma singing songs in a language I never understood. I must be more like an epiphytic plant which doesn’t place roots in the ground, relying on different surfaces instead.

What grows in Ukrainian soil feeds a big chunk of the world. Now I see it more clearly; passion for such fertile soil, a lifeline for so many beings, sounds utterly natural. The locals of a war-razed village near Kyiv found a forgotten corpse of an enemy soldier under a wild plum tree. In the interview I heard on NPR, the local forest ranger says, “I don't feel anything but disgust for him, I don't care what happens to his body. The best thing it can do is enrich our soil.” That soil is everything.

I wish I had a garden, but I don’t know if I would be worthy of one. Would I love it so much I’d risk my life just to go back to war-stricken land to tend to it, like those Ukrainians interviewed on the radio? What is this force I don't yet understand – invisible tendrils reaching out and snatching their hearts? Or plant whispers beckoning like an entrancing chant?

The majority of the flora on the Azores Islands arrived there by wind or ocean drift. Sixty-nine percent of the plant species there are non-indigenous. A lot of them were introduced to the land in the beaks of migrating birds. It reminds me, I too was once carried in the beak of a bird made of steel, but I was not a seed, rather a graft. Upon arrival at JFK, we were all quickly examined, clutching x-rays of our lungs in our sweaty palms. An immigration officer glanced at the crumpled newcomers with aversion, oh, just more outsiders about to take roots in our soil. That last name is just too hard to pronounce, your accent always gives you up. It’s suggested I help clean up after a party, I am Polish, after all. Someone else asks whether I am a cleaning lady or a nanny. What else could I be doing in their land? 

You, immigrants, always make everything complicated, said my English professor once. A few weeks later he accused me of plagiarism. I don’t know what you did, but you can get expelled for that. Expelling, refusing, a strange passion of some, obsessively removing what they consider to be ugly weeds from what they think is a fancy garden. It didn’t even help when the “green” card – which, regrettably, was not green at all – finally arrived in the mail. If I didn’t speak, I could pass for an indigenous species perhaps, but I dared to open my mouth once or twice, and a man at the bar yelled at me to go back to my country. As if I could uproot myself instantly and go away. 

Always already marked as an “invasive species.”

Out of the blue, Natalia sends a video. She narrates it in Russian and I don’t understand much, but I recognize the plants she wants to show me. I can tell she is jolly because she found something familiar in this place she’d never visited before. The video starts with a zoom-in of snowdrops, then she does a quick panoramic shot of the river in the distance. The coniferous trees that surround them must be quite different than those she is used to. But she enjoys their closeness nonetheless, breathing in the cold air of early spring. 

Lots of plants brought to the new lands evolve to tolerate harsh climates. So did I and millions of other almost-invisible migrants here and there. But my kind of evolving was a joke, a few inconveniences here and there, a sprinkle of humiliation, a pinch of disrespect, but overall – survivable. Like a pretty skilled chameleon but with no effort at all, I was always protected by my skin color, a tremendous camouflage, and a privilege at once. 

On lush, overgrown islands it’s practically impossible for a non-expert to tell indigenous plants from those which arrived from the outside. With its exuberant shapes and colors, they form delightful natural mosaics. They learn to grow together, they mix and match, make space for one another. Among humans, however, it’s often quite a different story.

I write to Natalia, asking for permission to use her words. She agrees and says “of course, you can use whatever you see fit and work for people's minds, souls and hearts… In general, people should know and understand that whatever happens in life, it is all temporary – pain and joy.  Many things here on earth can be fixed.” 

I don’t know how much our migrations and movement have in common with those wild resilient vines on the Azores, the Galapagos, or Kos; maybe nothing at all. Maybe it’s just so very simple, we all come from somewhere and have a right to live. Even after the biggest calamities, there comes a time when trees pop on ruins and grass covers heartbroken land. As long as we don’t destroy it all at once.

I wish we could all turn to nature for consolation, while it’s still here.