Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013
Braiding Sweetgrass is structured like the braid in its title: three strands twisted together through some 400 pages — Western botanical science, Potawatomi oral tradition, and personal memoir. Its five sections follow the handling of sweetgrass itself (planting, tending, picking, braiding, burning), and many chapters are named for plants. The book doesn’t argue toward a conclusion; it accretes.
What It Offers
One early claim sets everything up: Potawatomi grammar treats plants, like people and animals, as animate beings rather than things. Plants are not it. Before Kimmerer gives us any botanical information, she asks us to consider what we’re actually talking about when we talk about plants. That question is the book.
The botanical sections are genuinely rigorous — the mycorrhizal networks beneath a forest floor, the chemistry of sweetgrass, the evolutionary logic of nut mast years. Kimmerer is a credentialed scientist writing science correctly. But she keeps asking what the science doesn’t account for: why the asters and goldenrod are always found together, flowering in adjacent purples and golds, which she was told as a student was “not science.” The aesthetic harmony of two species is not, in scientific vocabulary, relevant. But it’s real, and it means something she needed other vocabulary to approach.
The Gift Principle
The gift is the conceptual core — set out in the chapter “The Gift of Strawberries” and later extended in her short follow-up book The Serviceberry (2024). The serviceberry gives fruit, and it gives extravagantly — more than any one species can eat, because that excess is what carries seeds to new ground. Kimmerer proposes this as a model of economy: not scarcity and exchange but abundance and gift. She contrasts it with commodity logic, where a thing has value only insofar as it can be priced, and once priced, only insofar as the price can be extracted.
Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (1983) provides the theoretical scaffolding she doesn’t always invoke by name: gift circulates, it creates relationship, it grows through giving rather than depleting. gift-economy is the concept; the serviceberry is the embodied argument.
Protocols
What distinguishes Kimmerer’s treatment of indigenous knowledge from romanticization is the word “protocol.” Harvesting sweetgrass has a protocol: take no more than half. Leave the roots. Come back next year and it will be there. Ignore the protocol and the stand diminishes. This is not mysticism — it’s ecology encoded in ceremony across generations of observation. The protocol is the distilled knowledge of what actually sustains a harvest over time.
The implication for the arboretum: protocols matter because they encode the wisdom that sustains the practice. Growing plants has protocols. Harvesting has protocols. Selecting seeds for the next year has protocols. Some of these have been lost and have to be reconstructed. The reconstruction is scientific and relational at the same time.
Connections
- Robin Wall Kimmerer — author
- reciprocity-with-land — the practice the book describes
- gift-economy — the economic model the serviceberry embodies
- one-straw-revolution — another scientist transformed by sustained observation
- seventh-generation — the temporal horizon the book holds
- embodied-knowledge — the knowledge that lives in practice and protocol, not just text
Source
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.