Opening Up Your Spirit: A Conversation with Debbie Millman
On trees as witness, the strength of the earth, turning a glum thumb green, an abundance of bounty, and surrendering to Mother Nature,
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Debbie Millman is a force of brilliance, wit, kindness, vision, creativity, humor, compassion, and, well, green thumbs. A native New Yorker, Debbie earnestly took up gardening in the nineties with a string of apartments scattered throughout the West Village and Chelsea. Things did not go well.
Then Debbie and
fell in love and as the pandemic launched Debbie found herself spending extended time in Los Angeles with her soon-to-be-wife and her sunny, largely unplanted garden. Tentatively, Debbie sowed a few vegetables seeds and then a few more and then some flowers. Soon she had a thriving garden. So thriving, in fact, Roxane set about creating delicious recipes from the bounty.From the abundance and the recipes grew Love Letter to a Garden that tells the journey of Debbie’s childhood in Brooklyn amongst the towering neighborhood trees right through to her current bicoastal gardens and all the wonder therein. And it’s illustrated with Debbie’s magical paintings and drawings based on a lifetime of photographs—a few of which are included below!
Debbie is the host of the fantastic Webby award-winning podcast Design Matters, one of the first and longest running podcasts in the world; Chair of the first-ever Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts, the author of eight books, and currently a Harvard Business School Executive Fellow.
I fell in love with this book and was so happy to be able to chat with Debbie about her relationship to trees, plants, the land, and herself!
⭐️ Debbie is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Love Letter to a Garden! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “LOVE” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, May 5th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️
I want to start with trees. They helped raise you. What’s your relationship like with trees these days?
Nobody's ever asked me that question before. I don't know that I would say that I have a relationship with trees, but I am mystified by them. All plants and trees are living beings. They might be living differently than we are, but they are living entities with a vast underground network of roots and relationships that they have with mushrooms and other trees. It's this living labyrinth that I’m endlessly fascinated by.
One of the things that I wonder about is if trees perceive time. There are evergreen trees and deciduous trees, and every year the deciduous trees come back to life. I understand that it's through sunlight and temperature and so forth. But the fact that it all happens at the same time, year after year after year.
And how much trees witness. I think about that quite a bit. Just the fact that they're there witnessing time, people, experiences. Decades, hundreds of years in some cases thousands of years, in others. That they know so much that we don't know that they know.
That gave me the chills when you said, “tree as witness.” I think that's very true. Do you talk to the trees as you're gardening?
No, I don't. In the book, I reference a dear friend named Maria, who taught me a lot about gardening. In front of her apartment building was a really beautiful tree. It overhung the building a little bit, and apparently there were some tenants that were afraid that the tree would blow over and into the building, so the owner had it cut down. I wept projectile tears about that tree, and could never again speak to those particular neighbors in Maria's building that instigated that murder.
That’s heartbreaking. I love the photo of your hands in the earth—or I think they're your hands.
They’re my hands. Roxane took that photograph.
Could talk about what that feels like? Prepping for this, I researched “why does dirt on your hands feel so good?” and discovered there’s bacteria in the earth that triggers a release of serotonin!
I had no idea, Jane.
I didn’t know that either. But it makes sense.
Most people wear gardening gloves, and I do too. But there gets a point in my gardening where they end up getting too dirty, and I take them off. I don’t know why I don’t go bare-handed more often, given how much I love the feeling.
There's something really strong about the soil, and about the ground and the earth. I remember quite a long time ago when I moved to my first apartment in Chelsea and I had a backyard that already had some very established rhododendrons, and somehow or another I managed to kill those too. I had to pull them out of the ground and I felt like I was fighting with nature! They didn’t want to go.
The sensation of the earth on your hands—does it have any kind of calming or invigorating impact on you?
The whole process of gardening has that effect. I don't know if I would deconstruct it in that way, but I do feel that pruning, deadheading and all of the maintenance is joyful to me.
And of course the bounty—the harvesting—which is really, really meaningful. Snipping some tomatoes from the vine, digging up some carrots or potatoes, picking the strawberries out of the patch and popping them into my mouth. That is truly glorious.
You might not be able to answer this with words—but can you describe why that's so meaningful. I know for me, it’s a body feeling.