By Margaret Roach
For The New York Times
Apparently the die was cast the day Matt Cohen and Elizabeth Hargrave met 25 years ago, when their first conversation turned to composting with worms. This would be a relationship between two people for whom the natural world was always front of mind.
Cohen was working for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., facilitating community and school garden projects, and gardening in a community plot. Hargrave was working on Capitol Hill as a health policy analyst, growing things on the balcony of her sixth-floor apartment.
Much has changed since, but earthworms are still part of the story. The couple have listed more than 2,550 other species of plants, animals and fungi in their shared mattandeliz iNaturalist ; and they have sightings of 960 bird species in a t eBird , another community science project they contribute data to.
The s bear witness to all the goings-on before them — the natural life encountered in the course of daily life.
Many entries are from their travels, which are heavy on birding destinations. But more than 200 and counting in iNaturalist are organisms identified in the quarter-acre yard around their home in Silver Spring, Md., which the couple bought a few years after they married in 2002. Years of regular applications of municipal leaf mold and wood chips have transformed their clayish soil with the help of earthworms and other detritivores, allowing the creation of gardens brimming with food for insect pollinators, birds and people.
A cottage-style front garden of native perennials surrounds an Asian persimmon tree (Diospyros kaki), and there is another persimmon behind the house, along with sour and sweet cherries, a fig, and raspberry bushes. Toward the very back of the long, narrow lot, past a small pond built in of wildlife, is a substantial raised-bed vegetable garden.
Other transformations: Today Cohen’s business, Matt’s Habitats, offers what he calls “wild foods nature walks” around the Washington, D.C., area. Hargrave designs board games, including the 2019 bird-themed hit Wingspan, which as of March had sold almost 1.9 million copies. Her latest, just released, is Undergrove, which explores the intimate underground relationship between Douglas fir trees and mycorrhizal fungi.
As different as their career paths are, it’s as if Cohen, 54, and Hargrave, 51, each heeded the words of naturalist and essayist John Burroughs. “Look under foot,” he reminded readers in more than one of his 20-plus books, including in “Leaf and Tendril” in 1908, when he wrote: “The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is ‘look under foot.’ You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.”
For Cohen and Hargrave, the power is in the connections that looking closely can reveal, and making such connections is at the core of the new game, the garden, the guided walks. Seemingly disparate sightings — like all those recorded in their iNaturalist and eBird s — add up to more than just names in a list.
“You see this, and then you see this, and then you see this,” said Cohen, “and then at some point you go, like, ‘Oh, connected. Oh, connected.’”
We are brought to deepening attention, just as Hargrave hopes we are with each move in her games.
“The through line for most of my games is that there’s something cool in the world that I want people to know about, that I think maybe a lot of people don’t pay attention to,” she said. Her portfolio includes games about monarch butterfly migration and the Victorian language of flowers, and now, with Undergrove, about the exchange of resources between fungi and trees.
“It’s just mind-blowing if you stop to think about what a complex system is going on below our feet without us being able to sense it at all,” she said. “And then we get these little glimpses of the outcomes. And I just like to stop and think about it. I hope people will stop and think about it.”
Foraging as the gateway
With thought-filled and sometimes tasty stops along the way, Cohen uses wild foods to teach his walk attendees about nature’s workings. It’s how he gradually came to grasp bigger parts of the picture. “Foraging was my gateway into the natural world, into appreciating the natural world,” he said.
He invites guests to sample snacks from wild ingredients, like “coffee” brewed from roasted persimmon seeds, and crackers topped with jelly from the fruit of linden viburnum (Viburnum dilatatum) on a fall walk.
Sauteed mushrooms may be on the menu, too. Fungi — edible and otherwise — are a recurring theme, each species in its season and in symbiotic partnership with particular tree species that he calls out to students, the way Undergrove underscores it for players.
In a nod to how important fungi have been in the couple’s nature education, three colorful glass mushroom sculptures adorn their backyard. And now a trio of charismatic but not-to-be-eaten fly agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria) are depicted on the cover of Undergrove.
They don’t actively cultivate fungi, though. “We’re pretty bad at it,” Cohen said. “And as far as mushrooms go, I really enjoy the hunt.”
On the group walks, food is the object lesson illuminating other creatures’ interconnectedness, not just the breadth of the human palate. If a zebra swallowtail butterfly floats by on a spring or summer outing, for example, Cohen tells his guests to expect to see pawpaw trees (Asimina triloba) — the only host plant the insect’s larval stage feeds upon.
“That makes connections with people who might just be interested in finding pawpaws,” he said, adding that they suddenly realize, “‘Oh, there’s this butterfly out there that, if you see it, it’s not coincidental. There’s a reason.’”
Vegetable varieties that click
Saving seed of favorite vegetables is another form of connection, in this case to the past and to tradition. “It’s not about saving money, but it’s just satisfying to be a part of what people had done for generations,” Cohen said.
His process is straightforward: to harvest seed from the fruits of each crop that display desired traits. “I just save my biggest butternuts in April that have lasted all winter that look the best, and those become the seeds for next year,” he said. Many others became the base for the butternut squash smoothies the couple enjoys all year.
There are Chantenay carrots, Lacinato kale, eggplant, onion and even rutabaga, specifically the variety Laurentian. “Our friends laugh at us about the rutabaga,” Cohen said, but he remains undeterred.
He lets some of his lettuce and kale bolt and set seed, and saves seed from an okra he’s grown for so many years he can no longer recall the variety name. No matter, a few pods left to dry will hold the stuff of next year’s pickled okra, and side dish after side dish of whole roasted pods.
Cohen doesn’t feel compelled to scour seed catalogs each winter for the next new thing; he has his “predictable stuff,” he said. As with the cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) in the front yard that reliably draws in the hummingbirds every August, he has identified steady performers for each garden purpose — ecological, ornamental, edible.
“Over the years, we’ve definitely gotten attached to certain varieties that just seem to really click in our yard,” said Hargrave about the vegetables in particular.
She rates Sungold cherry tomatoes as a must in their Maryland yard, and they grow Martha Washington and Celebrity as well. All are hybrids, meaning they don’t save seed year to year, since hybrids won’t reproduce true-to-type.
Their fruiting shrubs and trees for avian and human consumption ed the same test: productivity without fuss. A peach tree planted early on didn’t make the cut, but sour and sweet cherries proved prolific, as did raspberry bushes and a fig tree. The birds help with the harvests, especially of the cherries, and they are almost uncannily tuned into various hollies (Ilex) and serviceberries (Amelanchier), whose fruit seems to disappear almost before it ripens, as if the birds got an advance memo.
As many examples of connectivity as they have witnessed, and recorded, Cohen and Hargrave aren’t immune to the sense of awe in each happening. Moments like the one catalyzed in mid-September by their American beautyberry shrub (Callicarpa americana), with its clusters of tiny violet-colored fruit, imprint themselves in memory, not just on the eBird list.
“I had a three-mimid morning,” Cohen said, recalling the trifecta involving of the Mimidae family (Latin for “mimic”), birds known for their impressive vocalizations. “I saw a catbird, a mockingbird and a thrasher at the same time on the beautyberry, so that was cool.”
A lot of mouthy birds, filling their mouths with the garden’s offerings he had planted. Not a bad way for anyone, feathered or otherwise, to start a day.
