The Giving Trees
Playwright and arborist Vivian Keh on finding family and healing outside her back door.
I have manslaughter tendencies when it comes to keeping green things alive. Beautiful and damned, most of my plants have screamed for mercy as soon as I have wheeled them out of Home Depot.
I know this about myself.
Yet, in the summer of 2022, in a fit of lunacy, I purchased seven new houseplants, potted some of them, and left home for two weeks. Perhaps I was testing their mettle. Perhaps I was testing mine. When I returned, all seven had survived, and I became drunk and delusional with success.
I proceeded to give them names: Mookie (small and indomitable, like my favorite Dodger), Justin Turner and Archie (redheads and red aglaonemas), Tobey (spider plant), Howie (aloe), Ben and Felicity (peace lilies). They joined a ragtag team of four plants that my husband had been tending to for years on my behalf, including his crowning achievement: Killer, a six-year-old orchid.
“I’ve got this,” I assured him, shooing away his ice cubes and his water pitcher. “I’m going to keep these things alive.”
He looked at me dubiously.
“I’m excited to see how this goes,” he said with as much forced optimism as he could muster.
I downloaded an app and placed them on a feeding and watering schedule. I misted them regularly. When Ben seemed out of sorts, I moved him closer to Felicity. She grew, but he refused, his tender-hearted leaves sulking under the weight of our expectations.
Justin Turner was traded twice the following year—once from the Dodgers to the Red Sox and once from our upstairs to our downstairs. He slowly faded away, as overwatered plants and third basemen in their late 30s will do.
And let’s just say Killer wound up missing his former caregiver.
But everyone else is … still fine. When I left them alone for two weeks this summer, Archie and Felicity grew their first flowers, and I felt like a parent who’d missed her children’s first steps.
Never before had I invested this much time or pride in the world of the houseplant. I hadn’t thought about why I was suddenly inspecting soil moisture and testing tap water temperatures until I met someone else who got it—and not just the plant thing. The everything.
Until I met Vivian Keh.
Keh is a playwright who posts about the contents of her backyard with such easy beauty and quiet depth and lack of pretension—about pluots and persimmons and peaches and the puppies who love them, every thought an irresistible metaphor—that you wish you had her vision.
But it’s not just any old backyard, and it’s not a hobby. It’s healing. Keh turned her .25-acre lot in San Jose, Calif., into a mini-orchard of more than 50 fruit trees, and she did it as a refuge from family estrangement and emotional abuse. She grafted her story onto branch after branch that became her medicine.
And that’s where we connect.
While in graduate school at the Yale School of Drama, Keh wrote a play based on her mother’s life. Persimmons in Winter told of Korean sisters who survived wartime starvation. Years later, those fruits would become part of an ecosystem that would nourish both Keh’s body and her soul.
She shared part of her life as an arborist in a recent book by Amy Stewart called The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession:
“The ‘Saijo’ persimmon I planted—there’s something special happening around that tree. There’s energy around it. I feel like there’s some connection to my ancestors, to the ones I never knew, even to the ones who’ve been forgotten. All I know is I feel really good when I’m hanging around that tree. I talk to it, and I thank it.”
She knows that the care you give to what you love—or need to love, or wish you could love—doesn’t disappear when that love refuses you. It goes on and on and on in containers of a better fit, in peace lilies and plums, in plays and in essays, season after season, never without want.
It is hard work. It can be lonely work. But it matters. More on why, below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vivian, we met only recently through a phenomenal mutual friend who, over the course of her friendship with us, recognized the dysfunction in both of our families, the ways we had normalized it, and the ways we’d let it damage our self-worth. We’ve been lucky to have Sarah in our lives.
So fortunate. It was just very tense at my house growing up. My dad had a violent edge and my mom made me her ally, and it made him act worse. But every time I’d go to Sarah’s house, I’d see her parents hugging each other and dancing with each other. Those images were really important for me to see, two people in a positive relationship.
Meeting them was the first time I realized I had developed this habit of “borrowing” other people’s parents the way you might borrow a book or a cup of sugar—and I was 27 at the time. The other thing we share is that we are writers dealing with family estrangement and trauma. When did you realize that there was a story right outside your back door that could help you heal?
It was after my second round of IVF, when they implanted eggs, and I lost all of them. When I was going through that, my mother said, “It's a really good thing you didn't marry your first boyfriend. His family would've hated you because you couldn't give them any children.” I stepped back and realized she’d made every single one of the hardest things in my adult life so much worse. You expect your mother to help you heal.
I came out onto my patio one day, and as soon as I opened the door, I saw that this huge nest had fallen right in front of me. Inside, all these baby birds had died, and the only thing that was left was their little beaks. And weirdly, I had had all these eggs that were not good. It wasn’t just one thing—many things had conspired to help me see that nest. Not just a tree but the wind, the rain, the birds, and the mama bird. It felt like a sign.
I kept encountering these fallen nests. Before one of my procedures, a dove’s nest had fallen and there were all these cracked eggs. I thought: It can't be a coincidence. It’s not meant to be. It was the only thing that helped me let go of the desire to have children. I started to spend more time out there after that.
There are so many lives and stories that you are contributing to out there. You called it stewardship, and I love that word.
You see how connected we all are and how much we have to give. I was really poor for most of my adult life, just barely making ends meet. When my husband, Jonathan, and I finally moved to this place, one of the first things I did was plant a peach tree. It was funny—at a reunion with Sarah and other high school friends, someone asked, “What's your favorite moment from the whole year?” People talked about various experiences. But my favorite moment of the year had been taking a peach off my tree and eating it. And it really was! I had never tasted anything so good. It was so juicy, so full of life, and it was just dripping down my face. It was like, “Ding, ding, ding, ding!” I had grown this thing.
At first, it was a very selfish thing. I thought, “This is so awesome for me.” But then I saw all the pollinators. And then the birds that were taking all my fruit. I thought, “OK, I’ve got to shift my perspective on this. If I let my trees get big enough, there's plenty for everybody.” And there has been. So all these birds, and now the owls and the hawks, are coming in.
You've got this whole ecosystem that you're supporting, and so many things are benefitting. It feels good, especially coming from a place where I felt like I wasn’t making any difference in the world.
You’re doing in your ecosystem what a family would do for each other. It’s full of meaning.
There’s something spiritual about it, also. My yellow lab, Lucy, died shortly after things fell apart with my mother. Lucy’s favorite tree to sit under and eat from was the biggest one on my property, a non-fruiting mulberry tree, and I had grafted all these fruiting varieties to the bottom. There’s a beautiful concept in shaman books that you can send your prayers up through the canopies with big trees, and it’s like a microphone. It definitely feels like that. Every time I’m near that tree, I think about Lucy and talk to her through it.
But it’s still very hard, of course. Are you at the point where you think, “I just need to find a way to be okay with this estrangement? That this is the right thing for me”?
Oh, it is the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, but it is the right thing. Every relationship I have is healthier now. I still grieve the idea of a mother who loves me, and I probably always will. But I no longer have panic attacks when I hear the phone ring.
That happens to me every time the phone rings, too. Every single time. For a while, I couldn’t even look at my texts. I had to have my husband read them and tell me if there was anything inflammatory.
Yeah, this is not a Thanksgiving table kind of conflict. Something political can trigger a disownment, but the abuse we’re talking about runs deeper than that. It’s hard to explain to others.
Sometimes I feel like it’s such quiet work, this stuff we’re trying to get through, and nobody knows about it. Someone looking from the outside in on my life, I wonder if they ask themselves, “What is she even doing?” Because there was a period where I was more prolific with my playwriting. The ways that people around me measure a life that’s worthy gets to me sometimes because I’m not doing any of those things right now that are considered worthy.
That’s beautifully said. Writing itself can be such a quiet, slowly percolating art, especially when you come to it for the reasons I suspect we both do—to make meaning of our lives and the lives of others. The measure of its worth is often at odds with the process.
“Worthy” is a word I use a lot. Being worthy. Telling myself I’m worthy. I think about the quote I used in The Tree Collectors, that “growing fruit trees is a simple way to stay in love with the world.” But actually, it’s so much more than that. There’s that gesture of wanting to show love, but also wanting to be loved. The more time I spend out there, the more I experience trees that way.
Walking through the neighborhood with my dog, Kiki, and talking to these big trees, I feel so much less lonely. With all that they’ve seen and all the stories they can tell, these trees have their own wisdom. ♣
NEXT WEEK: Documentary photographer Bill Bamberger on how his adolescence inspired Boys Will Be Men, his continuing coming-of-age series exploring masculinity’s expectations. Plus, what people from Kigali, Rwanda to Mebane, N.C., have taught him about being human.