Ripple: What the Land Remembers

Tall grasses grew here 

Wildflowers painted sprays of colour 

Bees, crickets, dragonflies made the air seem alive 

Trees tried to reach the sun 

Frogs found perches to call 

Tadpoles grew fat 

Turkeys stole through meadows 

Rich forests sheltered all 

The hush of the wind 

Creeks giggled new paths 

Birds rode the sky 

Their laughter filling space 

I wove the tapestry of life 

And now it is undone

And then this one, which arrived separately but belongs beside it:

The frogs have stopped calling today 

The grass is still in the prairie 

Birds have settled on wire 

The plow slices through 

Cutting away the song 

Churning in the croak 

Breaking up the heart

These poems were written about real places. Fields I watched change. Landscapes I had known with their full communities of life and then returned to find diminished, quieter, emptier, less. The grief in them is real, and I do not want to soften it. The loss is real. But I want to tell you something about what those fields hold that the poems don’t quite say.

Underneath the silence, there is memory.

The first thing I do on any new restoration site is walk it without a clipboard. I learned this over years of running a native plant nursery and consulting on restoration projects, that the first knowledge comes from the walk, not from the data. What your feet tell you. What your eyes pick up without being directed. Where the water has written its history in the topography. What the weeds are saying about the soil below them. On a 95-acre farm in Ontario that became one of my defining restoration projects, the first walk told me everything. The compaction was physical, a resistance you felt through the soles of your boots, the quality of pressed sand that has been driven over by heavy equipment for decades. The water moved across the surface rather than into it. The weeds were reading the soil conditions like a language: Path rush in the wet corners, quackgrass on the bare, disturbed slopes. What I was looking for, underneath all of it, was what the land remembered.

Soil is not inert. A teaspoon of healthy prairie soil contains more organisms than there are people on Earth. Bacteria in the billions. Fungi in networks that extend for metres in every direction. An entire community of decomposers and grazers and predators doing the slow, invisible work that makes everything above ground possible. When land is degraded, ploughed, compacted, saturated with agricultural chemicals, stripped of organic matter, this community is suppressed. Not destroyed. Suppressed. Even in the most degraded fields, below the plough layer, there are survivors: fungal spores dormant for years, bacterial colonies in microscopic pores that the worst disturbance couldn’t reach. And then there is the seed bank. Seeds from native species present before the land was converted remain viable in the soil for years or decades, waiting for conditions that allow them to germinate. I have seen a drained wetland, when water levels are restored, produce a flush of native emergent vegetation that nobody planted: cattails, sedges, native bulrushes coming up from seed that had been dormant for thirty years. The land knew what it wanted to become. It was waiting for permission.

Have you ever really looked at a leaf, 

the way the veins divide and divide again until they seem to disappear? 

Marvelling at how the plant feeds itself. 

Each leaf of grass is like a fingerprint, unique unto itself. 

And then you look up at a vast field
and are overwhelmed by the preciousness of every blade. 

This is what the land holds. Not just memory of what it was, but the potential of what it can become. The biology is there, suppressed but present. The seeds are there, dormant but alive. The processes that drive recovery are intact even where recovery has been interrupted. The land is not dead. It is waiting.

The teaching is free because the goal is enough people to heal land so that it becomes the norm. If it helped and you’re able, push the ripple wider.

Start free: The full document is in the library:

https://app.planethealers.org/