Meet Cedar and Twig

Why I’m making a children’s book out of the weeds in your yard.

When kids can recognize brands before plants, I knew this was worth building.

A few years back I hosted a class of elementary kids here on the farm for Chef’s in the Classroom. We picked and talked about lamb’s quarters, dandelion, and stinging nettle, the three plants most people spend a whole weekend trying to kill, and cooked them into the egg sandwiches we made for them. Weeds, in their sandwiches. They didn’t care. Which, if you’ve ever tried to feed a green thing to a seven-year-old, is a win according to many parents.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that day since.

Those kids could name and describe a dozen logos on sight. But hand them a dandelion, the most recognizable plant on the continent, and those that recognized it called it “just a weed.” The plant is seen as something wrong. Something to pull.

That’s not the kids’ fault. It’s ours. Somewhere along the way, we stopped introducing them. We stopped trying to understand them.

So the question I keep circling back to is this: how do we hand these skills to kids while they’re young enough for the seed of knowledge to grow with them?

You already know part of the answer, because you've been reading it. For over a year now I've been building the most thorough plant dossiers I know how to make, deep files on the plants we call weeds, where the lab work and the old field knowledge sit at the same table and neither one gets to talk over the other. Where the two agree, I say so. Where they don't, I say that too, and where we just don't know yet, I say that clearly as well. I love showing a different side of who these plants actually are.

Because it was never really about eradicating them. A dandelion isn’t a mistake in your lawn. It’s one of the first flowers to open in spring, feeding the bees when almost nothing else will. It’s a taproot that drives deeper than the plant will ever stand tall. It’s a seed built to fly. That’s not a weed. That’s a strategy. The whole project, the monographs, the farm, all of it, has been about learning to work with these plants, and with nature, to find a balance that fits the land you care for.

And then one day it hit me.

If I can see the superpowers in a dandelion, why can’t a five-year-old?

What if I took everything I’ve been digging up in those monographs, the real biology, the actual quiet genius of these plants, and put it in a children’s picture book? Not a lecture. A story. What if a dandelion could spark the same curiosity in a child that it still sparks in me, fifty-odd years in?

That’s Cedar and Twig.

Cedar is a quiet boy who can hear the plants and animals speak. Twig is the squirrel who follows him around, saying most of what needs saying without a single word. Together they go looking, in the yard, in the cracks, in the ordinary ground under everyone’s feet, and they find that the plants everyone calls weeds have been quietly running the place all along.

The first book is Dandelion.

I am also working on books for clover, plantain, and sunflower for the first series.

The characters are fictional. The plants are everywhere. I made up a boy and a squirrel. I did not make up the dandelion outside your door, or the nettle by the fence, or the fact that our kids are walking past small miracles every single day and calling them nothing.

If you know one person, a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, who’d want this in a small pair of hands, forward them this post. Just the one. That’s how a thing like this grows: not in a blast, but the way the plants themselves spread. Quietly. Person to person. Root by root, the one kind of invasive I am actually rooting for.

More soon.

— Jay

A few sample pages to explore.