Ed. note: The post below is excerpted from Mulberries in the Rain, written by Ryan Blosser and Trevor Piersol, and published by New Society Publishers.

WE WALKED INTO THE ROOM at the University of Richmond to a packed house. Half the people in the class were wearing masks, the other half weren’t. In all, 40 people packed into a tiny classroom. It was the tenth course we had taught and our first since COVID. It was by far the largest course to date. We looked at each other with nervous glances.

Things started shifting just before COVID. When we first started teaching, our courses were small and homogenous. Our classes were filled with a certain type of left-leaning do-gooder. Mostly white, usually young, often wealthy or at least upper middle-class. By now, though, the makeup of our courses is becoming more diverse. Ideologically, we are seeing more people from the so-called right, more Christians, and a lot of veterans. Still mostly white, but less so. In addition, the courses are now multigenerational and tend to be made up of people less on the fringe and more folks feeling trapped by conventional workday life. COVID seemed to speed up this transition to more diversity in our courses, and it did something else. It made people hungry and anxious for change.

The packed room that day in Richmond had an energy to it. Nervous, thick, and full of both creative and destructive potential. We got the sense that if someone lit a match, the whole thing would blow.

A man in the front row in his 70s, with long stringy hair, faded tattoos blurred by the sun, and a cigarette pack hanging out of his pocket glanced around the room. A woman in her 30s made eye contact with me and said, “I don’t know if I’m ready for this.” She didn’t intend to speak for the group, but it was obvious, everyone was feeling the same. Whether they admitted it to themselves or not, sharing a small space with 40 strangers after the lockdown we’d all had was weird!

We had spent the last two years in our bubbles, with intimate friends and family or, worse, alone. Half the people around us thought the world was unsafe, and the other half believed people who were scared were crazy. The nervousness had an undercurrent of distrust.

Then it hit us: the feeling, the vibe, why were we all here? We didn’t have to ask. Ryan opened that course with this sentence.

“You are all here because you want to belong.”

The room exhaled and for the rest of the course we got to work, learning about each other while we learned about Permaculture. As we reflect on this first course we had after COVID, it becomes apparent that belonging is what Permaculture is about. It’s about belonging to our landscape as much as it is about belonging to a community. A surface glance leads us to believe that these are separate, but this changes when we look deeper.

During one of the icebreakers that day, a student asked us a question. This came on the heels of Ryan talking at length about his favorite plant, the beet.

“How do you know so much about so many plants? I don’t even know where to begin!”

Early in our respective plant journeys, we would memorize plant catalogs. Any plant nerd reading this understands this comforting urge. Just after Christmas, on a snowy day, Ryan liked to open a bottle of top-shelf whiskey, get a good fire going, and spread out plant nursery and seed catalogs in front of him. That ritual always kicked off the season.

The dream, the fantasy of plants to come, fed our spring and summer work. While this certainly paints a pleasant picture, the approach felt inadequate. Neither of us enjoyed the rote memory of it, the ability to spit out “back of the baseball card” facts about plants we had no relationship with. Instead, we longed for something deeper. Through conversations about this longing, we both landed on the fact that working and living with plants delivered the thing we longed for something more than facts—it was a relationship. A sense of comfort and ease with a plant due to having spent so much time with it.

This discovery came on the heels of shared stories, be it Trevor talking about his relationship to strawberries and how this is intimately tied to his son or Ryan’s relationship with cannabis and the funny, traumatic history he has with the plant. We realized that, in both of our lives, plants were more than just a theme song; instead, we were the theme song for plants. Much like an ecosystem, this interdependent story is the story.

The idea of belonging and building plant relationships snapped into focus.

Plants, like music and food, feed our culture. They create our community; they are our community, and this book offers a model for how to build both plant and human communities. Story by story-or rather, plant by plant—or, to quote a student on the first day of our post-COVID course years ago: “I came for the plants, but I’m staying for the people.”