I am already greatly enjoying this class.  I think I am going to get way more out of it than I expected!  My whole life I  have been drawn to plants and nature and have always wanted to be in a place to learn more.  I have grown up here in Washington and watched many of the places that I grew up knowing disappear due to logging and development.  The Earth's Blanket so far is very sad to me, yet enlightening too.  The metaphor it teaches hits home for me.  We should care for all of the plants on this earth and not take more than we need.  It is so hard for me to watch forests be leveled and replaced with real estate and businesses with such unsustainable practices and I can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like for the Native American peoples to have had to not only witness their lands being destroyed, but to also have had to participate in it for their own survival.  I interviewed Erica Guttman from The Native Pland Salvage Project last year and she told me about how her group salvages plants from develpment sites.  If her people get there as the bulldozers begin their work, they can hear the pain of the plants and animals that habitate there. 

I don't think that many Americans truly understand the value of a garden.  In other cultures, gardens are the center of life.  That is where their food and their living comes from.  Sometimes all you have is your garden and it must sustain you and your family.  I don't personally only know one couple that grows their own food, but I know a few that have ornamental gardens and some that garden to relieve stress.  I eventually would like to be able to walk outside of my house and harves what I am going to eat that night from my own yard so I am very excited to be in this class and learn about all of these things.  I like that we are required to journal and become closer to the plants that we co-habitate with. I have always respected nature and am looking forward to getting better acquainted with her.