The Friendship Garden

THEHIPPIEDIVA  ·  HEALING & GROWTH

The Friendship Garden

How healing grows in unexpected places

BY DAWN DE BRANTES

Ten years ago, I lost almost everything.

My career. My reputation. My home. My wealth. My self-trust. My identity. My freedom. And my mental wellness went right out the door with all of it.

Most people understand those losses on paper. What they don't understand is what happens afterward.

The silence, the isolation, and the strange feeling of becoming completely disconnected from the person you used to be.

When trauma enters your life, it doesn't just take things from you. It changes your relationship with the world around you. Untreated chronic PTSD coupled with undiagnosed ADHD had me in its grip. My own mind had become a place I no longer recognized.

For me, healing didn't begin with some grand breakthrough.

It began with a few plants.

A PARALLEL REALITY

Why Plants? The Logic Behind the Garden

I had spent twenty-five years as a professional communicator, entrepreneur, and start-up strategist. In business, I always started with a seed…an idea, then I figured out what it needed and grew it into something real. That was my nature. When everything collapsed and I found myself isolated, I had a gaping hole inside me and desperately needed to fill it with something positive.

I realized I needed a parallel reality. I needed something that let me start with a seed or a cutting, research what it required, nurture it to the point of thriving, and grow something within my own power. Something that responded to care. Something I could not fail at with love.

I started with a few Walmart rescues that were half-dead clearance plants pushed to the back of the rack, marked down because nobody else wanted them. They just needed water, sunlight, patience, and someone to pay attention.

Looking back, I realize they weren't the only ones being rescued.

"Those powerful beings rescued me right back. They gave me someone to talk to. They responded to my care, my interest, my touch. They offered me solace, focus — and the glorious state of no-mind I desperately needed."

But the most important part of this story isn't actually the plants. It's the people.

THE CUTTINGS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

How a Facebook Post Became a Friendship Garden

When I came home, I was unprepared for the level of glitch my brain would suffer. PTSD flashbacks and a racing, undiagnosed ADHD mind made daily life feel like white water I couldn't navigate. I didn't have money. My confidence was shattered.

One day, I took a risk. I made a simple Facebook post asking friends and family if they had any spare cuttings, seeds, or plants they'd be willing to share…  literally anything I could grow.

What happened next still brings tears to my eyes.

My people showed up. They brought plants, bought plants, and shipped plants. They dropped off cuttings from their own collections. Pothos trailing from their shelves, monsteras they'd been nursing for years, fern divisions, orchid keikis, seeds in little labeled envelopes. They brought pieces of their living world and placed them in my hands.

"Every cutting carried something more than roots. It carried love. It carried the message: we're still here."

Those plants became what I now think of as my Friendship Garden. Not because they all grew in the same place, but because every single one represented a relationship. A kindness. A reminder that healing doesn't happen alone.

THE ANCIENT TRADITION OF SHARING

Passalong Plants: A Tradition Older Than Garden Centers

What my friends were practicing when they handed me those cuttings has a name that predates Instagram, garden centers, and plant delivery apps. Gardeners in the American South have long called them passalong plants. Treasured varieties passed from neighbor to neighbor, generation to generation, because that was the only way they traveled. Grandma's rose, a beloved iris… a cutting that carries a living piece of someone's story into your own soil.

One of the most beautiful examples is Pilea peperomioides, the Chinese Money Plant, also called the UFO plant, the pancake plant, and, most fittingly, the Friendship Plant. It spread across Norway and Sweden in the 1970s entirely through informal exchanges. A neighbor asking a neighbor, friend gifting friend, long before any nursery ever stocked it. For decades, Western botanists had no idea what species it was. It was simply the mystery plant that someone gave you. By the time scientists formally identified it in the 1980s, it had already blossomed quietly in thousands of homes, passed pup by pup, cutting by cutting, through nothing but human generosity.

My story was a version of that same thing. Just a Facebook post instead of a back-fence conversation.

WHAT THE JARS TAUGHT ME

Searching for Roots: How Plants Healed My Mind

I became obsessed with those little glass jars lined along my windowsills, and I mean that in the best possible way. For someone whose ADHD mind races and whose PTSD kept pulling me out of the present moment, those jars gave me something healthy to hyper-fixate on. Checking them,  sometimes many times a day, for the first tiny white root threading out from a node became a ritual. Something to look for. Something to return to. Something that exists only right now.

Here is what the plants taught me, broken down to its simplest truth:

Receiving them gave me love. Unwrapping and prepping them gave me purpose. Searching those water jars for roots gave me hope. Seeing a root emerge from a stem restored my faith. And learning to trust the laws of nature — its quiet, stubborn resilience — helped me begin to trust myself again.

Digging in soil grounded me when nothing else could. It slowed my thoughts, reconnected me to my breath, and returned me to the earth's rhythm when my nervous system had lost the beat entirely.

"Roots develop in the dark before they're ever visible to anyone. That felt like something I understood on a cellular level."

Today I have over a thousand plants. I grow from seed, propagate from cuttings, rescue the dying ones from clearance racks, plant-swap with fellow obsessives, and plantscape both indoors and out.

Some people see a collection. I see a story. I see friends who believed in me when I couldn't believe in myself. I see reminders, green and growing, that I am not alone — and never was.

THE SCIENCE OF CONNECTION

The Wood Wide Web: What Forests Know About Healing

There is a phenomenon in forest science called the mycorrhizal network, the Wood Wide Web. Beneath every healthy forest floor runs a vast, invisible system of fungal threads connecting the roots of trees to one another, transferring water, nutrients, carbon, and chemical warning signals across distances we can barely fathom. Healthy trees feed struggling ones. Old mother trees send resources to seedlings. The forest is not a collection of individuals competing for survival; it is a community, quietly sustaining itself through invisible acts of connection.

Maybe people aren't so different.

My Friendship Garden is a small, living version of that network. Every plant that arrived in someone's hands carried an invisible thread back to them. And as those plants grew and multiplied and I began gifting cuttings in return, those threads extended further, into new homes, new windowsills, new lives, new jars on new kitchen counters where someone else was searching for their first tiny root.

That is the quiet magic of propagation. You don't give away your plant. You give away a new beginning rooted in something that already thrived.

YOUR FRIENDSHIP GARDEN

How to Start Your Own — Even If You've Never Grown Anything

My traumas and yours are not the same. Our healing salves might not be either. I dove deep into the power of nature to manage my PTSD, quiet my ADHD, and find my way back to myself. If you're looking for your thing and want to try plants, I cannot recommend it enough. The barrier to entry is a Facebook post and a jar of water.

But here's the bigger idea I want to leave you with.

Maybe healing isn't about becoming who we used to be. Maybe it's about growing into who we're becoming.

And maybe every one of us needs a Friendship Garden,  not necessarily filled with plants, but filled with people, experiences, passions, and living reminders that life still grows after loss.

Mine happens to have orchids, ferns, pothos, monsteras, and hundreds of propagated cuttings rooting in jars along my windowsills. Yours might look completely different. Maybe a kitchen where you feed people, a studio where you make things, or a porch where the hours slow down.

Whatever it is, find it. Tend it.

Because when we nurture life, life has a funny way of nurturing us right back.

And sometimes the smallest roots, the ones you can barely see threading out from a node in a mason jar, create the strongest foundations.

I'm living proof of that.

I am a work in progress. Please join me.

Dawn de Brantes

Writer, entrepreneur, and plant obsessive living in the radical act of beginning again.

THEHIPPIEDIVA.COM