For years I’ve been collecting photos of nature being brave, which I keep as a source of inspiration. It’s that “grass in a crack of the sidewalk” conundrum, a reminder that growth often happens in unlikely places despite unfavorable circumstances. These are my botanical role models: the volunteer tomato, grown from last year’s seed after a burst fruit dropped in a transplant pot, sprouting in a spot so shady it grows at a forty-five degree angle to access the sun; a tongue of catmint, its origins unknown, licking up from the untold depths of a toad hole; a daffodil that grew underneath a coconut shell in our fairy garden and proved most resourceful in finding its way to the light; this very special daisy sprung from an overblown parent plant I’d grown in a porch pot the summer before, its face somehow impossibly pink in spite of the white-as-milk blooms its ancestry wore.

Here are their headshots in the playbill for “You Can Do It Too: A Garden Production of Fortitude and Joie de Vivre as the Antidotes to Hardship and Inauspicious Beginnings”:

And a couple of closeups for clarity: