Buenezas of South Florida

Ten years ago, my friend Harmony made me eat aloe vera. The plant was growing tall and spiky in the front yard of our shared home in Miami, and Harmony cut the top of one of the thick serrated leaves and squeezed out a cube of glistening gel, like a freezer pop. I’d been suffering from stomach ailments for over a month; the aloe relieved my pain almost immediately. Seven years later, Harmony, who was about to move to New York, left the plant in my new backyard. It had once belonged to their mother, they recalled—and I felt the presence of the many hands that had cared for the plant before it reached me. This was not my first encounter with aloe vera that had traveled along familial routes: The aloe in my childhood garden had come from Puerto Rico, my mother’s homeland, where her mother had grown prickly pear and medicinal herbs. Whenever I was sick, I missed my grandmothers with a particular ache, eager to know what healing vegetation they would have turned to. So when I found myself ill with Long Covid, I read Ashkenazi Herbalism, Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel’s history and materia medica of the plants used by Jewish communities throughout the Pale of Settlement. In its pages, I discovered plants I’d come across in Miami and the Caribbean and erroneously assumed only thrived in tropical climates—including aloe, which in Poland, where my paternal grandmother’s family lived, was boiled into teas to help heal tuberculosis.

Every herbalist I’ve encountered has shared stories of meeting plants, speaking with them, seeking in them the wisdom of learned, well-traveled elders, which they are. Like humans, many have traveled long distances across generations, their seeds carried by wind or sea or hand across continents; others have continuously inhabited one location, persisting despite attempts to remove or rename them. The vegetal lexicon of South Florida encompasses plants and herbs whose seeds have arrived here by way of the pouches of colonizers (like broadleaf plantain, nicknamed “white man’s foot” for how it bloomed wherever white men settled); tucked into the braids of the African women who endured the Middle Passage; passed to younger generations by Indigenous elders and seed keepers; and nestled into suitcases carried across the ocean from Eastern Europe. “Sometimes I think I’ve never met a certain plant, and then I learn that my ancestors cultivated it, far from where I live,” my friend Gabriela Serra, an herbalist and educator, told me. I imagine gifting a cutting from the aloe in my yard to my paternal grandmother, who suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease after two years in Auschwitz and a subsequent smoking habit. Perhaps she would have recognized it from home.

And yet, despite the vast capacities of plants to nourish and heal us, we typically grow and eat only a minute fraction of the earth’s offering. According to a 2019 release by the United Nations Biodiversity Convention, 75% of our food is generated from 12 plant species (and five animal species), though nearly 30,000 plant species are edible. Florida is lush with edible plants—though, as in most states, foraging is constrained by various regulations and laws, many of which have anti-Black and anti-Indigenous roots, targeting criminalized populations to systematically limit their access to land. As writer and food lawyer Baylen J. Linnekin explains, the foraging practices of many Native Americans were “used to justify driving them from lands they had historically occupied”; settlers often claimed that Indigenous people had not adequately “improved” the lands they inhabited and therefore could not assert ownership. These fraught histories of dispossession persist. The Biden administration has proposed adding a “Wilderness Designation” to the Big Cypress National Pre­serve, an area stewarded by Florida’s Indigenous communities, which would transfer responsibility of the region’s conservation from the Miccosukee to the Depart­ment of the Interior. The Tribe would lose access to their own land, including the ability to forage there.

Still, Floridians forage anyway, gathering plants that nourish and heal from parks and gardens and coastal dunes. Refusing the logics of capitalist systems that deem certain lives—of people, of plants—worthwhile and others disposable, foraging communities in South Florida insist on the possibilities of shared wellness in the face of rampant gentrification and other structures of resource-hoarding. My friend Gabriela is part of a growing movement to dub weeds like cerasee and plantain, which are known in Spanish as malezas—the mal implying bad, pesky—buenezas, in reverence of their ability to feed hungry bellies, flourish in saltwater-logged soil, and treat common afflictions. Attending to the wisdom of plants is one way those of us in Miami can continue to nourish relationships within and across the Indigenous communities and the various diasporas that make their homes in the city. Gabriela, who is Venezuelan, connected with her neighbor Sangui, who is Jamaican and had briefly lived in Caracas, after he referred to plantain as llanten, the name she called it back home. If I am heartbroken, my friend Albertte Petithomme will suggest a healing herbal bath, a ritual from Haiti, where her family is from. My friends and neighbors regularly make each other tinctures and teas and salves with herbs gathered from our yards. We gift these plants to each other freely. If you don’t recognize a plant, a neighbor will certainly be familiar with it; if you don’t want a bueneza growing in your yard, somebody else will use it. In sharing these plants and cultural practices, we tap into an easy abundance we’re often told doesn’t exist in the systems we live under. This is its own kind of medicine.

What follows are introductions to five plants that grow amply in subtropical South Florida. I learned about these plants through my friends, relatives, and neighbors—and through the plants’ own pervasive presence. I can’t imagine a windowsill without aloe, a backyard without cerasee, a garden without plantain, an empty lot without Spanish needle, an Everglades airboat ride without swamp bay. I have drawn here on the foraging guide Eat the Weeds by “Green Deane” Jordan and his digital resource of the same name, and Buenezas in Little Haiti, a zine I helped write and edit with Gabriela, our friend Nicole Salcedo, and so many neighbors. Any medicinal or edible plant must be used under the guidance of an experienced herbalist; I offer these in the spirit of sharing what has been shared with me, and as an invitation to learn more about these plants—and the ones growing near you.