What Grows
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
I love my plants
in the quiet, devoted way
one loves something that does not rush.
The slow unfurling.
The daily noticing.
The discipline of care
that asks nothing dramatic of me
except presence.
There is peace in tending —
in learning when to water
and when to wait,
in understanding that growth
is not coaxed by force
but by consistency.
I like the dirt under my fingernails.
The small rituals.
The way patience becomes visible
when a cutting takes root,
when one leaf becomes two,
when life agrees, quietly,
to continue.
Propagation feels like a miracle
that never gets old —
the audacity of it.
That something broken off
can become whole again.
That abundance multiplies
when handled with care.
My home blooms because I stay.
Because I pay attention.
Because I trust the process
even when nothing seems to be happening.
And sometimes,
as I move among the green,
I think about how I wish
I had found this sooner.
Not for myself —
but for us.
I imagine another garden,
one I never walked through
with the person who planted it.
I try to picture what grew there.
What soil she was given.
What she learned to nurture
because nothing else was safe to touch.
I wonder what she tended in silence.
What she pruned to survive.
What seasons she endured
without witnesses.
I didn’t know her
woman to woman.
I knew the edges.
The outcomes.
The weathered places.
So I did what children do —
I filled in the gaps with stories.
Invented reasons like wildflowers.
Told myself she was thorny by nature,
forgetting that thorns are often
the language of protection.
If I had known her garden —
really known it —
I think I would have understood
how carefully she needed to be handled.
How easily things bruised.
How much work went into keeping anything alive
at all.
Now, I tend my own.
And in the quiet moments,
I grieve the garden
we never cultivated together.
The conversations that never took root.
The questions I never learned to ask.
The softness I didn’t yet know how to offer.
But I see it now.
In every leaf that leans toward light.
In every plant that survives despite poor soil.
In every act of care passed down
without explanation.
She was a gardener.
Of endurance.
Of beauty under constraint.
Of life, somehow, continuing.
And I honour her best
by keeping things growing.
By learning patience.
By choosing gentleness.
By letting what blooms in me
be proof
that her hands,
in their own way,
knew exactly what they were doing.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
This poem marks a deliberate turning point: not self-love declared prematurely, but self-harm consciously ended. Ceasefire frames acceptance as a strategic decision rather than an emotional breakthrough—an agreement to stop treating the self as an enemy while acknowledging that affection may come later. It holds optimism without erasing damage, offering a vision of peace that is tentative, earned, and quietly radical: the permission to exist, unfinished, without continuing the war.