Living Roots and Community Voices
“There’s something particularly lonely about attending to the minutiae of daily life while the planet is burning.”
I imagine this sentiment resonates for many of us, and it is also the first sentence of the introduction in the forthcoming Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods, edited by Liz Carlisle and Aubrey Streit Krug. Rather than despair, this work offers hope grounded in research, and a path forward. Living Roots contains essays by nearly three dozen researchers, Indigenous leaders, scientists, advocates, environmental educators, and scholars who share their knowledge and insight. Included are several locals, representatives and researchers from The Land Institute, and nationally known farmers and writers like Gary Nabhan, Wendy Johnson, and Leah Penniman.
A Little History
Much of the work presented in Living Roots, with its emphasis on perennialism, is rooted here in the prairie soils of Kansas, via the work of The Land Institute, opens a new window. Fifty years ago a professor named Wes Jackson turned down a tenured position in California so he and his family could move home to Kansas and start an alternative school. They soon established The Land Institute on the banks of the Smoky Hill River in Salina. Not much later Wes wrote New Roots for Agriculture, a thin book that upended ten thousand years of agricultural thinking by suggesting fields of perennial grains that only need to be planted once, rather than annual plants that require repeated plowing and replanting. That vision is, step by step, becoming a reality with unexpected and exciting permutations around the world. In the half-century since New Roots was published, we've seen Agroforestry and Cactus forestry, bison-based ranching, coffee plantations, wild lands, olive trees, prairies, and a story I stumbled on years ago, that of Australian native grains — 60,000 years of perennial food, just recently becoming known to those of us who aren’t Aboriginal Australians.
Learning Together is a Good Time
When so much feels beyond our control, coming together as a community to share, learn, and change what we can for the better feels powerful and nourishing. It may be all we have, but it’s everything. Learning together can also be a really good time, and I sometimes forget to highlight that. Speaking of which, to celebrate this book and the many community partners engaged in meaningful work related to its themes, we’re hosting a Book Launch and Community Table! The event will be held on March 31 at the library and is co-sponsored by the Commons at KU, the Land Institute, and the Raven Bookstore. Poet Jesse Nathan will open with a reading, and Liz and Aubrey will introduce contributors Kelly Kindscher and Megan Kaminski as well. We're also inviting a handful of community partners to reflect on what perennial culture means to them and add something to the community table to share with others, whether it be heirloom seeds, a recipe passed down, jam made from local fruits, or something else entirely.
Community Voices
Lawrence is incredibly fortunate to have so many amazing organizations and individuals engaged in land stewardship and sustainable growing practices, working together and eager to share their knowledge and experience with our community. To further underscore this collective effort, Jake and I reached out to some of these partners with a few questions about books, food, and plants. No surprise, the responses were thoughtful and lovely:
Sherry Kay, Past President of the Kaw Valley Mycological Society, opens a new window & co-author of A New Guide to Kansas Mushrooms
Favorite book on perennial culture
My favorite book relating to perennial food is Mycorrhizal Planet , opens a new windowby Michael Phillips. I've read this twice and still don't completely understand it, so on to the 3rd reading. I deal with ectomycorrhizae that produce macro fungi. But there are many more endomycorrhizae that support plant life.
Memory of eating food straight from the source
My favorite memory involving perennial foods occurred when I was about 4 years old. My mother and I were picking wild plum in a huge, old thicket. The bushes reached over our heads, and there were little winding paths throughout. Separated from my mom, I turned a corner on one path and found a coyote just picking a plum. He rolled his eye at me, grabbed the plum, and trotted off. I was enchanted.
Courtney Masterson, Ecologist and Executive Director of Native Lands Restoration Collaborative, opens a new window
Favorite prairie plant
All prairie plants are excellent! Today, my favorite prairie plant is rose verbena (Glandularia canadensis), because their leaves are emerging now, chartreuse against the cool, wet ground. Soon, they'll smother the land in hot pink flowers so fragrant you'll catch their scent on the wind as you walk through the prairie. Those flowers, among many others, greet us in early spring and rose verbena continues to bloom through summer and fall. What a gift!
Memory of eating food straight from the source
My earliest memories of gathering food from the land are from when I was a little one, walking through my grandmother's gardens on the banks of the Big Blue River, in Blue Rapids, Kansas. I was just a visitor to that land, on a summer trip to the country with my family from the east coast. I had never picked tomatoes from the vine, corn from the stalk. I was so enthralled I took about 100 pictures - on film! My grandmother was a wonderful land steward and so proud of the healthy river soil she tended. I can still taste the sun warmed peppers she grew, hear the freshly-caught catfish flopping in the stock tank, feel that beautiful soil under my toes.
Kaitlin Stanley, Executive Director of Kansas Land Trust, opens a new window
Favorite prairie plant
Spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis)
Amy June Breesman, artist, activist and seed keeper behind Bluejacket Handcraft and Good Way Farm
Favorite book on perennial culture
As a photographer, I will have to say my favorite book on (specifically Kansas) perennial culture is Terry Evans' photo book, Heartland.
Favorite prairie plant
Being from the east coast, my first conscious experience of prairie was at the condemned site of the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, where many of my family members attended grade school between the 1940's and 1970's. I remember the tall grass stretching for what seemed like miles uninterrupted, swaying in the hot summer breeze on the Oklahoma-Kansas border. To my then-untrained eye, it seemed like a single species overtaking the acreage, and the sense of being swallowed by the grass was immense. I still love that feeling when I am able to be out in remote prairie, so I will have to say it is a two-way tie between Purple Love Grass and Little Bluestem, for their showiness in the cooler months.
Memory of eating food straight from the source
The first time I ate a pawpaw was on a loose slope of a riverbank in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. We were living in Philadelphia, and it was early on in the COVID-19 pandemic. My partner and I had gone looking for hickory and chestnuts, but found ourselves also amid pawpaws along the Susquehanna River. I remember digging through leaves to find them like little treasures amid the September leaf litter, and thinking to myself how odd it could be that as an Indigenous person with lineage all through Appalachia, it took me 30 years to find a pawpaw. We stuffed our shirts full of them to bring back home, with the intention of making a few recipes. But, I could hardly eat them fast enough, and none made it past eating fresh!
Ways to learn more about perennial foods and get involved locally
Don't be afraid of botany, it is not just for academics! Learning a bit about botany has helped me understand the systems at work to produce (or not) many perennial foods in our prairie landscapes. While you're on that journey, it might take you to visiting Botanical Belonging, volunteering with Native Lands, taking a class at Prairie Park Nature Center, getting hands-on restoration experience in the Haskell Wetlands, participating in a prescribed burn at the KU Field Station, becoming an apprentice through the Common Ground Incubator Farm, or doing some extra ground-level noticing at the Baker Wetlands. These and other sites are good ways to get plugged into ways to make your yard an edible perennial landscape.
Aubrey Streit Krug, Writer, Researcher, and Director of the Perennial Cultures Lab at The Land Institute, opens a new window
Favorite prairie plant
Rose! My middle name. Blooms and thorns and all. And prairie roses are really deeply rooted. I love rose hip tea…and pretty much all tea. Nettle, sage, mint, bee balm, echinacea. I realize I’m starting to describe my backyard. There’s silphium and elderberry here, too, which are near and dear to my heart.
Debbie Baker, President of Lawrence Bird Alliance, opens a new window
Favorite prairie plant
Rattlesnake Master — every spring I look for it coming up in my yard.
Memory of eating food straight from the source
My job as a child was to pick the green beans in our small backyard garden. I'd eat them as I picked. And always left some for the groundhog that lived under the shed.
Ways to learn more about perennial foods and get involved locally
I think of this in terms of perennially having bird food-providing plants in my yard. I let the pokeweed grow so birds have winter berries. Echinacea and sunflowers house insects in the summer and provide seed in the fall. People can experience this by visiting the Hobbs Park native garden in east Lawrence and helping the Lawrence Bird Alliance maintain it!
Jake Vail, Author, former Land Institute employee, and 20+ year veteran of LPL 
Favorite prairie plant
Tough call. Silphium terebinthinaceum. Largely due to its fun-to-say Latin binomial, but also its huge leaves. The common name is prairie dock.
Favorite book on perennial culture
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, opens a new window. The writer and the book that uprooted and then replanted me. Because of Wendell I learned about his good friend Wes, spent a few years at The Land Institute, fell in love with the prairie, and became a Kansan. More importantly, The Unsettling of America addresses the root of much of what we're discussing, in ways that only Wendell Berry can. To steal a phrase (and probably a sentiment) from Wes, "If you haven't read it, you're illiterate." (insert winky emoji).
Terese Winters, Librarian at LPL
Favorite prairie plant
I have little bluestem growing in the ditch in front of my house, and it's so striking this time of year. But I'm fickle, and my favorite will change with the seasons.
Memory of eating food straight from the source
I grew up in the country, and we always had a vegetable garden. I remember eating tomatoes from the vine, and that the plants seemed so giant it felt like being in a forest.
We hope everyone enjoyed reading these reflections and ruminations from our neighbors as much as we did. See you all around the table on March 31st!
—Jake Vail, Terese Winters & Community
Grow with the Library's Collection
Audubon of Kansas Bird Watching Backpack
Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie
A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes from an Indigenous Food Warrior
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