Florilegium #2: Witness and the Natural World
By Sara Dudo
“Florilegium” is an explorative writing column by nature enthusiast, poet, adjunct instructor, and Palette’s associate editor Sara Dudo. “Florilegium” refers to a collection of literary excerpts or fragments, evolving from the early 17th-century Latin (flos, flor– “flower” + legere “gather”) literally translating to “bouquet.” While in medieval Latin, the word referred to a compilation of writings or notes, it later found use in describing anthologies relating to flora and horticulture. With one foot in the literary world and the other in the horticultural, Sara will explore through this bi-monthly column her braided history with agriculture and farm work, travel, and writing, offering her woven experiences and findings. For each memory, Sara will examine writing and poetry through the lens of collection, both of literary gathering and literal gathering of flowers, plants, maps, insects, and more.
Re: Witness and the Natural World
“You have to be in the world where you are, you have to witness to it, you have to look out the window or across the field and be not just an observer, but a passionate one. Embrace the incognito.”
—Don Revell
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The opposite of greenhouse is algorithm
No calculations; seeds pulp and bloom
unruly in their own time, praise
the plexiglass sun.
I spent a great deal of my childhood on family farms and produce markets, sitting in grass studying bugs, helping customers carry produce to their cars, making mud pies, and stealing big beef tomatoes to munch on like apples. I had a habit of perusing aisles of greenhouses: picture a small bobbing head of curls swimming amidst the rows of flower tables. Farm work and farm living is in my blood. As I look back on the decade I’ve spent working at a flower farm, it’s clear the role that place has had on my identity as a writer. My experience laboring in the sun for hours, learning all the names of the flowers and how they like their sun, and navigating the physical and emotional toll of manual labor during difficult times in my life has informed who I am, both as writer and human: that of witness. To witness is to notice the things that go unnoticed and to take account for them, to care for and tend to the natural world and allow this care to inform writing, to understand the role of witness as one of intensity and isolation, but always imperative to sharpen and improve craft.
I never lacked subjects to witness at the farm. Days were spent moving plants and flowers from hothouse to hothouse, memorizing scientific and popular plant names, cleaning and deadheading blooms on rainy days, learning different plants’ desired care, growth habits, and sun preferences, and overall, observing everything. I explored flower hybridity, researching zinnia varieties and wondering what two flowers were merged together to create something new. I was drawn to the language and plant name etymology, labels like dreamland and sun cherry as well as scientists’ surnames and their origins. I jotted down notes about sepals, pistils, and the general anatomy of our popular crops. Which flowers are the hummingbirds enamored with? Which crops can I find swarms of bumblebees delirious in their pollen ecstasy? This constant curiosity, followed by diligent recording, was prodding at the soul of witness in poetry: to notice, uncover, record, and share. This is the time when my writing life and my experience with the natural world first intertwined and informed each other. I was known for stealing flower tags from 4.5 inch pots and annual flats of little seed plugs. I’d keep them in my pocket, and write down their information later in my journal. On the back of one yellow receipt, I wrote:
May 18, 2015
The popular pansy is actually a hybrid plant, derived from the merging (hybridization) of species: Melanium, genus: Viola, specifically tricolor. Kim says also called “heartsease.”
This would later inform a poem I wrote about an accident I endured as a child at a farm market, wherein I considered my genealogy of farmers while losing consciousness: “my hands covered in viola heartsease.”
I started hoarding the yellow receipt papers we used for “grocery lists” of flowers to pull from back greenhouses. After I crossed off each variety of wave petunia or lemony portulaca or hardy geranium, I’d use the blank backs to note things the crew would say, birds I’d seen nesting in the back fields, or the way the sun poked through the greenhouse ribs at lunch time. The role of witness came easy at the flower farm; there was always something to observe, and I was eager to resign authority to the images that come along, ripe for poetry.
April 30, 2016
- 3 big indigo Angelonia, 2 archangel raspberry.
- 4 spaced busy bee yellow Calibrachoa
- Ageratum? Blue and white.
- 5 flats of pachysandra…
Watched some of the other workers play “dirt ball” back behind the greenhouses, the fields across the way. After checking for failed flower plugs or rotten ones, they put all the dirt in a bucket, and watered it enough to be a clumping mud. Took fistfuls and made the dirt into baseballs… someone across the way would swing with an empty flower flat, and, if contact, a confetti bomb of dirt over their head.
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May 15, 2018
Coleus:
- 1 salsa verde
- 2 velvet or golden gate
- 1 luminesce
- 1 spitfire…
The mama killdeer yelled at me as I drove near her nest in the grass. I assured her I wouldn’t hurt her eggs. I was busy worrying about filling greenhouse #2 and the general wheel of time… she was trying to save her lineage.
I was spending almost every day loading trucks, watering thirsty sproutlings, and organizing greenhouses, and was entranced with what each new day brought, thinking very little about life outside of this place of dirt and seedling and sweat.
June 3, 2017
This week: saved a thirsty hummingbird trapped in the greenhouse, used a broom to guide it down into my palm. Found an untouched monarch butterfly too.
The impact of holding the small hummingbird in my hand, of being quiet with it sitting in afternoon sun, and observing its breath was cemented in my memory. I later wrote in a poem, “a hummingbird panting in my palm until it is ready / to collect its tongue and enter the mouth of a lily.” I was learning that a poem is the activity of the evidence, but not necessarily the evident. And to make way for the poem, I had to resist establishing the self, and rather, look beyond the self, and see what this attentiveness finds.
July 5, 2018
Heard chirping when washing my hands, found a baby bird on the ground- baby birds have nested in the electrical box next to the sink [make a sign].
The art of noticing, and bearing witness to the natural world around me (and the way the natural world also tended to collide with this man-made operation of greenhouses, plastic, and flower product) became the springboard I was looking for in my writing. Instead of focusing on the self, and writing my experience on the farm just for the sake of telling my story, I strived to silently, and as gently as possible, witness everything around me, and document thoroughly. As Claudia Keelan would later teach me, to “focus on the exterior and subject, without bringing notions of self and point of view into frame, but rather, letting the thing that is being looked at determine that.” In other words, sometimes, take yourself out of it.
I took note of the insects seeking refuge on everything from cannas to lavender: red admiral and buckeye butterflies, angle-wing katydids and spotted lady beetles, carpenter, bumble, and honey bees, both living and dead, and a luna moth the size of my hand. I refrained from making their life and beauty out to be something metaphorical, something transient in loose relation to my life at the moment, but instead, focused on abstaining from “using” their beauty: they just were. I would pause watering perennials to watch the beetles circumnavigate a flower pot. This kind of witness and immersion of the self into its surroundings (albeit, done imperfectly since I was known for swooping in to save struggling insects and mammals, and giving my two cents when a worker or customer said something I overheard and didn’t agree with), helped me to ask myself the difficult question: what did I think of beauty, for beauty’s sake?
Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the obvious: the work was very, very difficult. The last thing I would want to do is romanticize farm life, or manual labor. On a flower farm, it is a witness of intensity.
Maintaining that witness spirit as a writer means undergoing and enduring stressors and pressures, both emotional and physical, in order to learn, observe, and write. My body is evidence of my witnessing; see the sun spots, the cracked skin of my fingers, the white vitiligo marks on my hands, arms, and face. Days upon days of direct sun for hours as I helped put up fence posts for hundreds of blackberry bushes or organized line after line of fall chrysanthemums in the dead of summer. I watered whole greenhouses of overgrown white-star bacopa and jeweled angelonia as the plastic warmed beyond 100 degrees fahrenheit and the metal hose-handle burned to the touch. I was part of a crew that loaded and unloaded box trucks, one after the other, full to the brim with hanging baskets, flats, trays, pots. Intensity was the norm: even for my youth, the exhaustion of the month of May (the pinnacle of the busy season) burrowed into my hips, my knees, my spine.
July 17, 2016
After laying out the black watering tube system for the fall chrysanthemum crop, I got dizzy and fell down. No one helped me up.
This entry would later be the starting point for my poem, “Greenhouse Triptych,” where I explored pushing the body to its absolute limit amidst a place teeming with life: “A drink of water. A diadem of bandana. / My body a failing corolla, / I am surrounded by mass photosynthesis.”
August 18, 2020
I’m putting the pink and yellow yarrow on “life support,” sitting cross-legged on the black mat, and trimming crepe myrtles too big for their pots. The scissors are rubbing pink bubbles onto the shell of my thumbs. August burns.
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May 8, 2017
I dream of unloading dust-bottomed trucks and wake / myself in sleep as my arms support imaginary trays and pass empty air onto / my spare pillow, rolling beads of sweat tucked behind my ears for the demand / of a defeated body even sleep cannot stop,” (from Body Talk).
And what was my suffering and perseverance good for? The ability to see. To see the body, and witness what it is capable of. To have the opportunity to grow something in collaboration with others. And to inform that which I already knew, as well as that which I knew nothing of. As my professor once instructed, “Pay attention, and let the thing you’re paying attention to take you where it wants to.” The writing witness must be willing to be taken to those places, to observe well, to seek, and to find. And regardless of the success or failure of writing, it is never in vain. Writing demands certain things: you don’t always walk away unscathed…I’m not saying you have to ache in order to write well… but maybe you do, just a little.
Which brings me to my final point on witness, writing, and flower work: the role of witness is often a solitary and lonely role. I watched a lot of people come and go.Each season, I bonded with coworkers through loading trucks and passing flats. We came to know each other through constant conversations while cleaning geraniums on rainy days. When the heat started to peel back our insanity, pranks lightened the mood. Each new season, I would return in April expecting the same crowd, but always, there’d be a few missing faces I’d soon liken to specters still floating around in the herb garden, echoes of their breath and voice taking up the flower air. I always felt their absence, regardless of our level of closeness. A small part of me was jealous that I couldn’t escape like they had, but primarily, I lamented not being able to witness them any longer: their laughs, their good days and bad days, the conversations where a sliver of deep gold memory grew between us.
But it’s a joy to know and to lose, and the writing witness can still be a joy, even if it’s solitary. My poetry is evidence of this: lines interwoven with the joy and sorrow of remembering, witnessing, and learning, sometimes alone, but always habitual, devotional. I’d read under the willow tree by the break room, watching birds nest in the limbs above, taking breaks from underlining and writing notes in the margins to watch the crews pick peppers and cabbage in the far fields, and both wish to be somewhere else entirely, and also enamored with the world of green I was inhaling. Joy must remember despair, despair must remember joy.
In more recent years working part-time, I’ve made note of how these observations have changed, coinciding with how my writing has changed.
May 12, 2024
Every day is punctuated with longing. For another place, another time.
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May 23, 2024
“Noone / bears witness for the / witness.” I’m seeing the years come and go, and this may be true… but I don’t believe in this fully. It’s a privilege to bear witness, and anyone, anything can.
—from Paul Celan: Selections (Poets for the Millennium) (Volume 3)
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June 15, 2025
“Anything I’ve ever tried to keep by force I’ve lost”
—from Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, pg. 67: “Watching Television”
(coworkers entering this farm world and then leaving, deadhead blooms tossed in the lake to extend their beauty, lost youth- I was once 19 fixing blackberry shoots, suddenly I’m 29, etc.)
Any space can be the catalyst for witness. The emphasis, at least for my writing, is being able to accept the abundance, the intensity, and the occasional emptiness, and trying to capture it all–and maybe, in the observing, the inquiring, one might discover something unforeseen.
From “Searchlight”
My epochs are frames
in plumbago, trimming lobelia
in the years that pass
through themselves.I have been where language stops
and only hands exist:
I pluck red vinca in a glass house
Look at all the firmamentabove me: stars bent
into pendulums.
