Hi there, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and this is Women Who Travel.

This episode we ask, what happens when plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?

Is it any different from humans who move? When are they considered out of place? When are they allowed to belong?

And are they accepted or rejected by the people who live there? Can we look at plants to better

understand our own relationship with the world.

I sort of started with plants that were intimately connected to me, and I kind of just said,

okay, what are you telling me? Are you telling me something about poetry? Are you telling me about the history of plant breeding? I just sort of asked questions of each plant to begin with.

I gave myself that permission to play.

My guest is Jessica J. Lee, who's Canadian and of Chinese and Welsh ancestry.

She currently lives in Berlin, and she's an environmental historian

who also teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge

and is a children's book author. Right now, Jessica's talking to me from her Taiwanese mother's home

in Ontario. Jessica talks of how her mum constructed a coy pond in their home in suburban Canada,

but Ontario winters are harsh and so when it got cold, the fish were moved to a tank in the dining room.

It was a relentless attempt to recreate a Taiwanese landscape far from home.

Your mother has a koi pond in Canada where you are right now, I think. You're at that house.

I'm at my mother's, yes. Does she have a coipon now, or was that left behind?

She doesn't have a coipon now because she's in an apartment, but she does have a fish and her garden still.

But in most of the places she lived where she could still have a

koi pond, she had one. And it was this way of connecting herself to home and a kind of past

aesthetic of, you know, growing up in Taiwan and the ideal garden that she wanted to see in her life.

I really love the way that you're able to use this writing about plants

...