12/03/2024

Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer 🌱

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a wise book that explores the connection between humans and nature (humans are nature!). As a botanist and a member of the Indigenous Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer weaves together botanical knowledge with Indigenous stories and personal memories. She shows that plants and ecosystems are not just resources, but also teachers that can teach us about reciprocity and care. The book emphasizes the importance of gratitude — the idea that the Earth continually offers us gifts, and that we have a responsibility to give something back. Through her poetic, contemplative tone, Kimmerer invites the reader to slow down, listen more closely, and fall in love with the world around us once again.

For this cover, I braided meters of different kinds of green rope to mimic the feeling of braided sweetgrass. In contrast, I made the endpapers more illustrative. I love creating various shades of brown in the linework by layering red and green ballpoint pen.

✷ Genre: essays

✷ Themes: ecology, human impact on nature, cultural traditions

✷ Recommended? Yes! For every human who wants to spontaniously burst into tears from seeing fresh green buds on the trees.