PLEASE PLANT THIS BOOK

PLEASE PLANT THIS BOOK - was a wonderful volume distributed by the hippy innovator and writer, Richard Brautigan. It consisted of a folded and glued folder containing eight seed packets. On each packet was printed a short poem and overall the instruction was to plant the seeds. As Ken Kesey later said, “plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.”
Here the seeds were not themselves strange but the mystery of their blooming is ever with us. Brautigan beautifully embodied that in this tiny plantable volume containing hundreds of seeds and words!
Each word is a seed. In yoga they talk about mantras as containing “seed syllables".” Each life grows from a seed and we are their blooms. Like a flower our roots are in the earth and we ascend, via a mysterious heliotropism, to the sun.

So when we see ourselves as a tree or a blossoming plant with all that beauty, vitality, fragrance, fruit and flower - we along, with the other things of this earth, can ever more deeply appreciate this precious human life.

The eight poem titles and associated seed packet in “Please Plant This Book” are as follows: California Native Flowers, Calendula, Carrots, Lettuce, Sweet Alyssum Royal Carpet, Squash, Shasta Daisy, and Parsley.

“The only hope we have is our
children and the seeds we give them
and the gardens we plant together.”

"Lettuce" from Please Plant This Book (1968)