TED Talks Daily Book Club: Love Letter to a Garden | Debbie Millman

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.

0:30Millman, writer, educator, artist, designer, and host of the beloved TED podcast, Design Matters. Why Debbie, you might ask? Well, she just released a beautiful illustrated book called Love Letter to a Garden with original recipes from her wife, author, and fellow TED speaker, Roxanne Gay. The book and our conversation is about Debbie's journey toward becoming a gardener and everything else that goes into the loving act of tending to the soil. You don't have to be a gardener to appreciate Debbie's story. In fact, she doesn't think of this as a book for gardeners at all. Rather, a love letter to our ability to create something beautiful from nothing and the strength and resiliency that come from engaging with the things we love most, however big or small.

1:16Now on to our conversation.

1:24Hello, Debbie. It's so great to see you and have you back on the show. Oh, thank you. It's great to be here. We're together today for a very exciting reason, which is that you have a beautiful and vibrant new book called Love Letter to a Garden. So can I start by just asking you, why did you choose to focus on a love letter to your garden and what does your garden mean to you? Well, I decided to focus on my garden and gardening in general because I was invited to by the publisher Timber Press, which is the gardening imprint of Hachette. I would not in any way have ever considered doing a book at all on gardening because I'm still working on being a good gardener.

2:13Hachette had seen some other work that I had done. Actually, one piece that I had created for the TED conference that was completely online during COVID. This wonderful editor, McKenna Goodman, saw my work and asked me if I'd be interested in doing this book in a similar method, which is what I call visual storytelling, which is combining photos, illustrations, watercolors, paintings, collage with words to tell a story. And I laughed when I got her email because there's no way that I could ever be a gardening guru. I am just not that good and border really on being okay and suggested that perhaps the direction could be a quest to become a gardener.

3:04And she was intrigued and I was able to persuade her of that direction and off we went. Yeah, I'd love to talk a little bit about that quest idea. Why did you come to think of this book as a quest story rather than a traditional success story? Well, success is still elusive, although I have moments of success for sure. But I've always been intrigued by gardening. I think there's something really magical about the idea that a seed contains an entire species of plant. That there is this tiny little seed that could and has become a tree or a plant or a flower. And I find that endlessly fascinating.

3:58And when I was a little girl, I would make things with rose petals. I tried to plant my own apple tree using seeds with my grandmother that we planted together in my Staten Island backyard. I wonder now if it is a tree, but since I have no way of knowing and doubt very much, I just like to fantasize that somewhere in a backyard in Staten Island is a giant apple tree that I planted in the 60s. And then over the decades, still dabbled. I often had apartments with tiny little decks or backyards and always tried to make something beautiful with very, very little success. Debbie, you mentioned that story about your grandmother who suggested that you could plant an apple seed and maybe it would grow into a tree.

4:48And we don't know if one is there now. I actually would love for you to read that passage. We went out to our backyard and dug a hole to plant the apple seeds. As I was digging, I unearthed a dollar bill. I was in awe. How had it gotten there? Did someone plant it? I had so many questions. It was then and there I began to associate gardening with wonder.

5:16That childlike awe of the world and wonder is something that we tend to lose as we grow older, and it's something we talk about at TED a lot. Yeah. How have you grappled with losing wonder? And after returning to gardening, did that help you in finding wonder again? It's such an interesting and good question, Elise. I have a lot of young people in my life, nieces and nephews and friends with children. I don't have any children of my own, so I spend a lot of time watching my friends' and family's kids grow up. And I see how kids are all born with this sense of wonder and joy and curiosity and courage in the way they learn how to walk and talk, how they play, how they create worlds within their worlds.

6:16And I see just in general, not specifically with them, but I just see in general how by the time a kid gets into third or fourth grade, that really changes. And I worry that that is because of the way we're socialized, the way that we begin to get graded and have to live up to expectations that are sort of out of our purview, how we end up having to compare who runs faster, who's smarter in math and so forth. And I think that if there's any way to keep that wonder ignited through a person's life, that it is such a worthy effort. My own sense of wonder in many ways was extinguished when I was a little girl shortly after that experience planting seeds because my parents got divorced.

7:18It was a very acrimonious divorce. I didn't see my father for years and years. My mother remarried and married somebody who was really brutal to all the kids in the family, but particularly me because I was the oldest. and it's taken me a long time to sort of recapture that sense of awe about the universe. And I think that's why I'm so fascinated by science because that is so, or seems so, both empirical and magical. And while there are laws of physics that we have uncovered and discovered, there is also this unknown, this magic that we are constantly contending with. Or maybe scientists would probably prefer to call it mystery, but I think it's magic.

8:10And that's something that I think about all the time. You were born and raised across New York City. Yes. And being a New Yorker is a huge part of your identity now, always has been. I love the quote from the late Oliver Sacks, who is an author and scientist, neurologist, who wrote that New York is a city sometimes made bearable only by gardens. Yes, that's a great quote. Well, when people think of cities, I'm not sure that gardens are the first thing that pop into their minds. And so for you and clearly for Sacks, gardens have become a huge part of how you view New York City and your love for it.

8:49So I'd love for you to just reflect on gardens in a more urban environment. I think gardens in an urban environment are a respite from the pace, the freneticness, the ferocity of the city. Gardens, by just the nature of being still, encourage us to ponder, encourage us to be still alongside. And there's something wonderfully meditative about being surrounded by nature, as opposed to honking cabs and speeding bicyclists. Right. All the things that we contend with as urban dwellers. Yeah. And gardens, I think, just by the nature of being gardens, are very peaceful, very beautiful to look at and be in.

9:50And they encourage us to observe and witness and experience in a very, I think, profound way. And I think it's so necessary for people in cities to have these places. I think that in many ways, that's why the High Line is so popular, because it is so beautiful in this very unusual place. There's something I learned recently called the High Line Effect, which is how cities all over the world have been creating these spaces for people to go and appreciate and experience and observe and witness nature because the High Line has been so popular. And I think that's so wonderful that this beautiful, original park of sorts could inspire other architects and artists and gardeners to make these spaces for people all over the world.

10:49Oh, yeah. It happened when I was living in Seoul. They made essentially a high line or they were inspired by the high line and they took an old highway and turned that into a walkway and a garden and an area for respite for the people of Seoul. So, yes, the effect is happening and taking place. And I'm curious, we have Earth Day coming up. More and more people are moving into cities, but resources are scarce. Space is hard to come by. How do we think about reconnecting with nature in the face of a growing climate crisis and, you know, just the affordability problem of having the land and the space to garden?

11:29Well, for anybody that might be a climate crisis denier, I've seen firsthand having gone on an expedition to Antarctica where you can see the planet's most exquisite icebergs. and you can also see chunks of ice that have crumbled off of these icebergs. And you can see the ocean peppered with all of these small boulders of ice and snow. And that is evidence of these icebergs melting. and being in a place like Antarctica, where it is so pristine, where it is so clean, where there are real serious rules about bringing any kind of bacteria onto the land, is suffering from climate change, then you can only assume that every other place on the planet is also being affected.

12:42And I mean, not only is it concerning for humans, we are really just a species on this planet. We owe it to our home to take care of it and to be respectful of it and to be in awe of it and to have wonder with it and about it. And the idea that we might be doing anything to harm this planet is just unthinkable. I've been very, very, very lucky in that I have gone on many different Nat Geo expeditions around the world, and I've seen how people live. The range of flora, the range of environments is magical. It's wondrous. And I think that we as a species, as likely in the top two or three smartest species on the planet, we must hold ourselves accountable to keep it as pristine as we possibly can, given what's ahead of us and the damage we've already done.

13:52Let's turn to topics the two of us talk about fairly often, which is fear and failure and loss and then resilience afterwards. You brought it up a little bit at the start of the conversation, and these are themes that you explore in your work. At one point in the book, you wrote something like, the boxwoods perished as well. I was flummoxed. I was told that nature finds a way. I felt I had completely lost mine. Talk to us a little bit more about this. What has failure in the garden taught you? Well, failure in the garden means the death of these plants that were living. And without sounding too dramatic, I just felt like a murderer.

14:38I just had no ability to keep things alive and could not understand why and had to really figure it out and had to learn. You know, you reach a point where anything you're trying to do on your own that doesn't seem to work, you either have to pivot or you have to figure out what you're doing wrong. And at that point, I wasn't willing to pivot because I enjoyed it so much. I really loved it. And this is pre-Los Angeles. This is in the garden that I have in New York in my home. And I tried and tried and tried. I planted hardy things like rhododendrons and azaleas and tried peonies and sunflowers in a sunny spot of my garden.

15:25And nothing stuck. I mean, I'd have it really nice for a couple of weeks and then it would wilt. And it wasn't because of a lack of water or too much water. And so I had to learn. I had a neighbor who was a very, very, very dear friend of mine who had lived on my block for 40 years. and she had a little postage size stamp concrete deck outside her apartment in the backyard. She did have quite a lot of luck with container plants and the little bit of soil that she had and took me under her wing a bit and taught me quite a lot about her urban gardening efforts. And then when I was in LA and I was still having mixed results at best, especially with corn, you know, which no beginning gardener should try.

16:13I should be trying. I have to tell you, it's just so far above my pay grade. In any case, my cousin Eileen, who's an avid gardener, she really helped me. And she's the person who I was sending the photos to on the regular to say, how did this happen? What did I do wrong? Right. And yet you have written or you've mentioned to me that you were initially afraid to ask for help. Oh, yeah. And so I'm curious why that was. Why did you fear asking for help? And then how did you end up finding the courage to keep trying and to reach out for some more resources? I've gotten to a point in my life where I'm old enough to know what I'm good at or what I consider to be good at.

16:59Yeah, yeah. And I like doing those things because they make me feel like I'm doing something well and worthy. And there's a good feedback loop there. But I've also gotten much more tentative about doing things that I don't know how to do. Mostly because I'm afraid I'm going to look foolish or humiliate myself in some way. Or I'm embarrassed that I don't know something that I should. And, you know, one thing I've learned being a teacher for as long as I've been, that the students that are afraid to ask questions, those questions are usually questions that everyone else also has. And though they might feel silly about raising their hand and asking the question because they think, was that gone over already?

17:41Did I miss it? Why don't I understand this? Is there something wrong with me? Am I not smart enough? Mm-hmm. Despite seeing and witnessing that, all the time, I was still afraid to look foolish or ask for help. And I look back on that now and think, what a lost opportunity to just keep learning. And not just in terms of gardening, but just in any aspect of my life. And actually learning from others and watching other people learn from others now has given me a lot of motivation to try new things, which, you know, in my 60s is something I never thought would have happened. I'm not a person that likes change.

18:25I'm not a person that likes failure. I'm not a person who likes humiliation. But I have come to understand that you can't wait for confidence to show up to give you a sense of urgency or ability or permission to do something. Confidence only comes after the successful repetition of any endeavor. And the success only comes after learning. And so there's this journey that you can take to confidence, but you can't start with confidence. You know, speaking about wonder and young kids, you have to learn how to walk. You have to learn how to talk. You have to learn how to go potty. There's so many things that we have to learn.

19:12Why would we think as we got older that things would just happen with osmosis just by the sheer virtue of being exposed to something or the sheer virtue of just wanting to be good at something? The rules don't change. We have to go through that learning space between knowing and not knowing. And that learning space is a roller coaster and often dotted with failure. Yes. I think we forget that or get scared of it. And it's only a failure, really, if you give up forever. You know, other than that, it's just, you know, a process. Right. You're just not good at it yet. Yet. Right. I'll keep telling myself that.

19:48There's still hope. There's still hope. You know, that's the part. There's still hope. Right. Right. All right, Debbie, I've got another passage for you to read to us. There's a beautiful story in your book that you tell about a bush of white peonies that lived among weeds. Could you open up the book and read that passage for us? There was an elegant bush of rather immodest white peonies that lived alongside a tangle of weeds in a rundown building on my block. I admired it nearly every day for years and often wondered how it got there. Who planted it? Did itself so? One evening, while walking home from work, I realized the peony bush was gone.

20:35There wasn't a hole where the plant had been. There wasn't any splattering of dirt or debris. Its sudden disappearance was as mysterious as its existence. I was heartbroken. A few days later, I ambled by the building where my beloved plant once thrived and stopped short. There was a small bouquet of white peonies in the same exact spot. I approached it slowly, gently reached out to touch the flowering buds, and realized they weren't real. Someone else, mourning their absence, had placed a plastic plant exactly where the real peonies had lived. Real or not, my heart was a little less broken that day.

21:23I'm always so impressed by the lengths New Yorkers go to make their lives beautiful. That's lovely. That's lovely. this actually connects to a posthumous compilation album of Tupac Shakur's. I don't know if you know this. Really? Yes. That's, that's, that is, I'm impressed. Yes. That range, that connection, that core of association. We do our research here at TED Talks Daily. Spot on. You know, he wrote poetry too. And there is a piece called The Rose That Grew From Concrete. I know you're a big hip hop fan. So do you want me to share it with you really quick? Please. I would love to hear it. Tupac wrote, Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?

22:11Proving nature's law is wrong, it learned to walk without having feet. Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air. Love lived the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared. R.I.P. Tupac. I know. R.I.P. Oh, I hope there's a big garden around you somewhere out there. Yeah, same, same. I obviously pick up on the themes of tenderness, but also resilience and perseverance from these two pieces of writing. We've touched on it already today, but after hearing this passage and the poem, I'm curious what the natural world taught you about resilience. I think that the idea that almost everything in nature is recycled, that the seasons bring forth both new life and hibernation, is something that I'm mystified by, endlessly fascinated by, and again using that word, in awe of.

23:28I've spent probably most of my life trying to overcome obstacles some of which were put in my way for me and some of which I put in my own way but there's always been this sense of hope that I've had about what I could be or what I could make or contribute and I thought about this a lot over the years And I just came up with the notion that in my life, I have one notch, maybe one atom, more hope than shame. And that keeps me going. Yeah, that's lovely, Debbie. All right, I want to pivot a bit and turn to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book was arguably born out of the uncertainty we felt during the pandemic.

24:21And I'd love to know your reflections now that we're five years on, but still coping with the after effects. What did you learn from writing this book and over the course of the pandemic that have helped you understand where we're at now, which feels like a very tumultuous and chaotic time? Well, one thing that I experienced but have had great difficulty maintaining was the notion that I didn't always have to be busy and productive all the time. Yes, yes. We got to come off of the hamster wheel. Yeah. Of booking meetings in your calendars. Yes. Oh, my God. I love that. I loved not feeling obligated.

25:04I loved not feeling like I had to say yes to everything because I wasn't being asked to do much. And so I realized probably for the first time in my life that I felt okay not being busy, not being obligated, and swore to myself and to my now wife, who also swore back to me, that we were going to maintain some semblance of this moving forward. that we were going to respect the stillness and the ability to be more introspective and circumspect about what we said yes to. And I would say that that's gone out the window. Like, that's long gone. And we both look back on that experience feeling very lucky that we came out of it without very much illness.

26:00No one in our family suffered greatly from COVID. We lived together for the first time in our relationship during COVID. So many people were like, so how's it going? Thinking that because it was the first time that we had suddenly, you know, begun to hate each other. It was actually the opposite. We ended up eloping when, in fact, we'd planned this very big, beautiful wedding that we didn't get to have because of COVID. No regrets there at all. And so one of the things that I experienced was this profound feeling of peace. I hoped that I would learn how to maintain that. And I haven't. But it is something I still aspire to trying to reignite at some point in the future.

26:52Although it's, you know, planning for the future is such a crapshoot because we don't really know. And any control we think we have is just some false pretense we create for ourselves to feel like we have some certainty when in fact we don't. I mean, I think COVID showed us that. There was also that aspect of the way being still for so long played with time and really emphasized that elasticity of time. And you write about this theme and return to it in your work a lot. You even started your popular 2019 TED Talk with the Big Bang and the creation of everything. Now, as you mentioned at the start of the conversation, you talk about the seed as kind of a metaphor for the Big Bang and where everything begins.

27:43Why is time something that's so important to you and a real curiosity and an anchor point for your work? I think that time is so important to me because it is, for me, one of the great mysteries. I heard something yesterday about how if we traveled to Andromeda at the speed of light and came back, we'd have traveled for ourselves, you know, maybe a couple of days, but it would be millions of years on Earth because of time dilation. And the idea that while time feels so fixed for us is so varied all over the universe is just a mind-blowing concept to me. Yes. Yes. But, you know, for me, I think about time also very selfishly, like what how much more time do I have?

28:55What kinds of decisions do I need to make about the time that I have? I never, ever thought about time as I was a youngster and even well into my 40s. It wasn't until I hit my 50s and now my 60s that I think, how much more time do I have? How could I be more choiceful with the time that I have? How could I make the things that I've always said I wanted to make but haven't? How could I learn the things that I've always wanted to learn but was afraid to? So all of these choices become so much more potent as I get older and think maybe if I'm lucky, I still have one third more of my life to go.

29:43You mentioned Roxanne. So let's turn to talk a little bit about your wife, Roxanne, who has a very sweet role to play in the book. Roxanne loves to cook and you share your connection through your garden and the food that you grow. So can you talk just a little bit about the L.A. garden and what it's grown into? Pun intended. When COVID happened, I ended up moving to Los Angeles. And because I had a lot of time on my hands, I started working really diligently in our backyard, which was just sort of your more typical suburban backyard with grass and some boxwoods and things like that. And started to turn it into a vegetable garden and planted some lemon trees and little trees that were already sort of in creation as opposed to from a seed.

30:38and slowly but surely did have some success. My biggest success being my first ever salad comprised of everything that I had actually grown myself. And listeners, you get to see the parts of Debbie's salad from her garden in the book. So it looks delicious. Roxanne is quite an imaginative cook. She's really talented and she makes up a lot of her own recipes. She's always doing inventive things in the kitchen. She makes things that she doesn't like just because I like them. And part of what was so wonderful about COVID time for us was the harvest of this plentiful garden that I had started and nourished.

31:25So we had a lot of fun. I am not a cook. The only two things I can cook involve chickens, and we do not have chickens and did not in any way raise chickens. So everything was very vegetable-based or fruit-based. We were making all sorts of things with tomatoes. I just had an overload of all sorts of tomatoes, and she created this extraordinary recipe for tomato galette, which is in the book. We had a lot of strawberries, and so she created a recipe for a strawberry tall cake as opposed to a strawberry short cake, so there'd be more cake. There was a good ratio of cake to strawberry, which was very important to me.

32:07So great. That first salad that you ate with the ingredients that you grew, you described the excitement that you felt when you ate it for the first time in the book. Can you describe that memory and that feeling for us? And just what is it like to eat the things that you've grown? When we're creating art or podcasts or anything that is creative, you know, you wonder, is it good? Is it not good? You need feedback. You need somebody to sort of tell you. It's very hard to just say to oneself, at least I've experienced this. Maybe other people experience it differently. Oh, me all the time. But I'm always needing reassurance and feedback and coaching.

32:55But with a salad, like it either tastes good or it doesn't. The lettuce is either too bitter or it's not. The seeds of the cucumber are either crisp or they're squishy. I mean, there's so many things that just tell you. You don't need, it's sort of like math. One plus one equals two. It's empirical. Right. Yeah, exactly. You don't need show notes. Exactly. You don't need somebody to give you a sense of what you could do better. Right. Although, of course, there is always doing better, but a really delicious tomato is a really delicious tomato. Yeah. And so that was what it was like. It was magic and wonder that we had grown and created and constructed this salad that was absolutely delicious.

33:47It was, dare I say it, divine. And I felt a lot of pride. I bet. I'll bet. My heart was sort of bursting. You know, I talk a lot about heartbreak in the book, but my heart was bursting at that moment with pride and joy and deliciousness. Things just taste better after you've grown them, too. Oh, my goodness. You know, because, like, you've been with the fruit or the vegetable or the herb for the journey. Yes. It's just, there's a reward there. Debbie, we haven't talked about your podcast and how long you've been a podcaster. And for your podcast, Design Matters, you have now interviewed literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people from all walks of life.

34:31And you've helped many, many more people, myself included, to understand why design matters, how it's connected to the way we live, and the way we are connected to one another. So I'm curious if there are things that you have learned from your many conversations and from your own design practice and your career that you take with you into your pursuits today, whether it's gardening or anything else that you're trying to learn and get better at. Yes. Emphatically, yes. When you're talking to some of the world's most creative people, it's inevitable you're going to learn a lot. one common denominator that I always keep in mind now in my own search for something meaningful to make and do is the notion that no matter who they are, Oscar winners, Emmy winners, EGOTs, P-GOTs, Peabody winners, Webby winners, New York Times bestselling authors, famous artists that show in galleries all over the world.

35:40Famous designers at the top of their game, performers, musicians, gardeners. Everyone still is searching for more and for better. I don't know that there's anyone that I've ever interviewed that's really, really great that is resting on their laurels. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Especially when they've achieved something great. They don't want that greatness to be behind them. They want to keep achieving greatness, keep doing more, keep making more, keep making a difference. And that is really comforting. yeah that's a great way to end but before we wrap up i'd love to take one more moment to reflect on where we are now and what you're hoping people will take from your latest book you mentioned what keeps you going and it made us think of a quote from your ted 2020 video the view from the sky is so abstract, it reveals our connections, our continuity, and our scale.

36:48Nevertheless, it's hard to see the big picture right now. It's such a difficult time in the world as we pause and dismantle and rebuild our culture. I think back to my travels. I've seen how different we are, how diverse and distinct. But I've also seen our commonalities, how much worship means in Tibet, in Pakistan, in Italy, in China, in Cambodia, and in Peru. How much peace means to our future, how much we regret the mistakes of our past. And now, insisting on what matters, no matter what. There is still so much beauty in the world, so much love. I'm hopeful for the next generation, for every creature, large and small, and for the planet we call home.

37:53Debbie, there's so much going on in the world right now. It doesn't feel peaceful. and the feeling of community can be really hard to hold on to at times. So for those who read this book and who are listening to this conversation, what are some things you hope people will be able to take away from spending time with your book and, you know, with us, even if they're not a gardener? In many ways, this is not a book for gardeners because there's no advice. there's no how-tos there's no befores and afters it's just an attempt my sort of somewhat feeble but earnest attempt to make something from nothing and I think that is a metaphor for all of us anybody that is creating something a drawing, a podcast a meal is making something that wasn't there before Yeah.

38:57And that is a worthy effort. It's usually a valiant effort. And I think the more we try to remake what's happening right now with a sense of hope about what we could do as opposed to a sense of despair about what is not in our control, the more chances we have of being able to make a difference. I mean, that's really what we need to make right now, is a difference. The book is Love Letter to a Garden. The author is Design Matters podcast host, Debbie Millman. It's been so rewarding and lovely to be in conversation and in friendship with you. Debbie Millman, thank you so much. Thank you, Elise.

39:51Thank you for your heart and generosity and wit. I love it every time. I love our collaborations. Me too.

40:04That was Debbie Millman in conversation with me, Elise Hugh, for the TED Talks Daily Book Club. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Lucy Little and edited by Alejandra Salazar. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tanzika Sangmarnivong. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.