The greenhouse smelled like earth and promise, and I loved every inch of it. Grandmother's hands moved through soil with the kind of certainty that came from decades of understanding. Not forcing, not commanding, just asking. Her fingers pressed seeds into dark earth, and I watched from my place on the wooden stool, knees pulled up to my chest, trying to memorize every movement.
GRMA: Plants are like people, Lisa. They respond better to kindness than commands.
I was eight years old and didn't understand what she meant. Plants weren't like people. Plants didn't talk, didn't think, didn't make choices. They just grew or didn't grow based on water and sunlight and whatever mysterious forces made green things reach toward the sky.
LIS: But you're telling them what to do. You're putting them where you want them.
GRMA: I'm suggesting. There's a difference.
She patted soil around a seedling with gentle pressure, her weathered hands treating it like something precious. Which, I suppose, it was. Everything that grew in Grandmother's greenhouse eventually fed someone, healed someone, helped someone. The tomatoes became sauce. The herbs became medicine. The flowers became hope for people who needed beauty more than bread.
GRMA: Watch this.
She held her hand over a vine that had been struggling for weeks, leaves yellowing at the edges, growth stunted. I'd seen her try everything - different soil, more water, less water, moving it to catch better light. Nothing had worked. The plant was dying, and even Grandmother's expertise couldn't save it.
But now her hand hovered above the leaves, not touching, just present. And I watched something impossible happen. The vine straightened. The yellow faded from its leaves. New growth emerged from stems that had been dormant for days.
LIS: How did you-
GRMA: I asked it what was wrong. It told me.
LIS: Plants can't talk.
GRMA: Not with words. But they communicate. You just have to learn their language.
I stared at the vine, trying to understand. Grandmother had always been strange, always insisted that plants had feelings and preferences and ways of expressing themselves. I'd thought it was just the way old people talked, giving personalities to things that didn't have them.
But that vine had responded to something. Had listened to something. Had changed because Grandmother had asked instead of commanded.
GRMA: Try it. That seedling there, the one that's drooping. Ask it what it needs.
I looked at the sad little plant she indicated, its leaves curled in on themselves like it was trying to disappear. I felt stupid reaching toward it, felt even stupider trying to... what? Listen? To a plant?
But I held my hand over it anyway, closed my eyes, and tried to feel whatever Grandmother felt when she worked with growing things.
Nothing happened. The seedling stayed drooped. My hand felt like just a hand, warm and slightly dirty from helping with soil earlier. No communication. No mysterious plant language. Just me being foolish in a greenhouse while Grandmother watched with patient expectation.
LIS: I don't feel anything.
GRMA: You're trying to hear words. Plants don't use words. They use sensation. Feeling. Pay attention to what you're experiencing, not what you're thinking.
I tried again, this time focusing less on listening and more on just being present. My hand over the drooping seedling. The warmth of the greenhouse. The smell of earth and growing things. The particular quality of light filtering through glass panels above.
And slowly, so slowly I almost missed it, I felt something. Not words. Not even thoughts exactly. Just a sense of wrongness, of discomfort, of being in a place that didn't suit. The seedling didn't want to be here, in this pot, in this corner of the greenhouse where light came filtered and weak.
LIS: It wants to move. Toward the window.
GRMA: Good. So move it.
I picked up the pot carefully, carried it to the southern window where light pooled warmest and strongest. Set it down in a spot that felt right in a way I couldn't explain. And almost immediately, the seedling's leaves began to uncurl.
Not dramatically. Not like Grandmother's vine. Just a subtle shift, a relaxation, a sense of relief that I felt echo through whatever strange connection I'd established.
GRMA: You have the gift. I wondered if it would skip a generation, but there you are. My granddaughter, the plant-speaker.
LIS: I didn't speak to it.
GRMA: No. You listened. That's more important.
She returned to her work, and I stood by the window, watching the seedling respond to sunlight it had been craving. My hand tingled with residual sensation, with the memory of that strange connection. I'd felt what the plant felt. Understood what it needed without words.
GRMA: Remember this, Lisa. Plants will always tell you what they need if you're willing to listen. But they won't respond to force, won't obey commands that go against their nature. Cooperation, not control. Partnership, not domination.
LIS: What if I need them to do something they don't want to do?
GRMA: Then you're asking the wrong thing, or asking the wrong plant. There's always a way to work together. You just have to find it.
I touched the seedling's pot, felt it settling into its new home, and believed her. Believed that plants and people could work together, could understand each other, could cooperate toward mutual benefit.
That was the first lesson. The most important lesson. The one I carried with me when my power manifested fully years later, when thorns became extensions of my will, when I learned to ask growing things for help and have them answer. Cooperation, not control. Partnership, not domination.
I believed it then, in that greenhouse, with Grandmother's patient hands showing me how to listen. I believed it for years afterward, as my power grew and refined, as I learned to work with nature instead of against it.
I believed it right up until the moment my thorns turned traitor and reached for Vazroth, eager to help him grow, choosing cooperation with death over partnership with me.
And now, standing in a battlefield where my core philosophy has become my greatest weakness, I wonder if Grandmother's lesson was incomplete.
What do you do when cooperation means betrayal? When partnership means destruction? When the plants you've worked with your entire life choose to help your enemy instead of you? What do you do when everything you believed turns against you?