13 Native Plants Found in Roots in Ink

I wanted a secret garden. That’s the only thing I remember from reading Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 book, The Secret Garden. I couldn’t tell you anything about the plot or the characters. Just that when I was done I wanted a little corner of the world where I could be surrounded by nature.

My mother took this to mean I wanted my own flower bed in her vegetable garden and that’s probably my earliest memory of my expectations not meeting reality. I’m probably the same age my mother was at the time and I definitely get why she couldn’t just whip me up the enchanted garden of my bookish dreams.

The book clearly had an impact.

In Roots in Ink, former finance fuckboy Liam Doran is tasked with turning the sterile, over-manicured grounds of the Belhaven Island Art and History Museum into something that resembles what the property looked like before the estate was built. Emma DiMarco is an herbal alchemist whose magic can increase the healing properties of plants.

My use of plant magic in a fantasy book isn’t groundbreaking. But what is a bit different is using plants that are native to North America as opposed to the United Kingdom which influences a lot of popular fantasy books (roses, lavender, chamomile, etc).

The earliest drafts of Roots in Ink took place on a fictional island in the American Northeast. Imagine if someone picked up Shelter Island and plopped it between Long Island and Connecticut. For reasons that I’ll explain in another post, Emma and Liam’s world is entirely fictional, but the geography is still modeled after this part of the country.

Being that it’s fantasy and I make the rules, I could have used whatever plants I wanted regardless of where they’re found in real life. But doing so would run counter to one of the central themes of the book: a symbiotic relationship with nature is necessary for humanity to thrive.

13 Plants in My Book and in My Yard

In some ways, I’m like Liam. I’ve spent the past few years tearing out invasive plants and replacing them with ones that are native to this part of North Carolina.

Some of those invasive plants were put therein the late 1990s by the landscapers hired by the developer. Others were put there by me with honorable, but misguided, intentions to save the bees.

It’s a long and slow process when;