Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee,

host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people

in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry,

and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality. What do plants do when life gets hard? Strew the world with

floral beauty, writes biologist David G. Haskell.

I like this thought very much, and the impulse behind it, that plants and flowers can be

teachers to us, not only showing us the importance of holding beauty in difficult times,

but how to live within the seasons.

Plants feel the changing world with extraordinary sensitivity, and their lives unfold in response. The blooms we see each spring and summer aren't

simply magically there, although it may seem it. Buds closed one day, an eruption of color and pollen the next,

are a result of a living conversation with the seasons.

In this week's story, David introduces us to snorkelwort, columbine, daffodil, and spring Beauty, four wildflowers through which he has come to know

the seasons of his home in Atlanta, Georgia. This story is rich with David's lyrical, scientific

detail and traces the relationships and histories that shape when and how these flowers bloom in this place.

The delicate timing between plants and pollinators.

The migrations and evolutions that bind species together in reciprocal flourishing.

And the human movements that have carried flowers across oceans, imposing cultural ideas of spring in lands far from their origin.

Looking closely at these blooms as the seasons that hold them convulse and shift,

...