I planted some broccoli seedlings a little too shallow, and while they were small, they leaned over. But as they grew, they turned upward from where they had fallen and kept growing straight up, full of life. If I force them upright, the tops end up slanting instead. It was as if they were telling me, “Don’t interfere.” Out in the field today, I could feel it: plants are truly alive.
Have you ever fussed over a houseplant—moving it to a sunnier window, trimming it again and again, checking on it every morning—only to watch it droop? Or noticed that a plant you almost forgot about is doing just fine on its own?
In 1953, the Japanese thinker Mokichi Okada wrote a short essay called “Plants Are Alive.” It grew out of his everyday life: the trees he cared for in his garden, and the flowers he arranged at home. His message was simple. Plants are living things, and they do best when we treat them that way and stop handling them too much.
Trees That Fix Their Own Shape
Okada loved caring for the trees in his garden. He was always cutting branches and adjusting their shape. Now and then, he made a mistake and cut in the wrong place, or cut too much.
Planting new trees had its own problems. Because of the space available, he sometimes had to put a tree in a spot he did not like. He might even have to turn the “back” of the tree to the front, or set it facing sideways.
For a while, these trees bothered him every time he looked at them. But then something interesting happened. As time passed, each tree seemed to adjust its own shape, little by little, until one day it fit its place perfectly. “I can only think it is alive,” Okada wrote. Trees, he was sure, must have a soul too.
He compared this to people. Just as we tidy ourselves up so we won’t feel embarrassed when others see us, a tree seems to put itself in order.
An Old Gardener’s Advice
Okada also shared a story he had heard from an old master gardener. When a tree would not bloom, the gardener spoke to it directly: “If you don’t bloom this year, I’ll cut you down.” And the tree, he said, would always bloom. Okada had never tried it himself, but he thought it could well be true.
He also remembered something he had read in a book. A person in the West took care of a tree with special love. The tree normally needed fifteen years to reach full size, but it grew just as large in only seven or eight years—about half the usual time.
For Okada, the lesson was clear. If we treat everything in nature as having a soul, we will not go wrong.
Flowers That Settle on Their Own
Okada saw the same thing in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. He arranged the flowers in every room of his home himself. When an arrangement did not look quite right, he simply left it alone. By the next day, the flowers had settled into a better shape. “They truly seem to be alive,” he wrote.
He never forced his flowers. He arranged them as naturally as he could, and so they stayed fresh and lasted a long time. Handling them too much, he said, only kills them. His method was simple: first decide where a stem should go, then cut it cleanly and set it in place in one smooth motion. Like any living thing, a flower grows weaker the more we fuss over it.
Twice as Long as Usual
Arranged this way, Okada’s flowers lasted more than twice as long as usual, and everyone was surprised. People generally avoided using bamboo or autumn maple in arrangements—probably, he thought, because they don’t last long. But Okada liked to use them. Three to five days was easy. Bamboo sometimes lasted more than a week, and maple about two weeks.
He also left the cut ends of his flowers just as they were, whatever the flower. Flower teachers, he noted, took all kinds of extra steps—and in his view, those steps only made the flowers fade sooner.
The Same Is True for People
Okada believed this principle applies to people as well. When parents worry too much and fuss over every little thing, he wrote, their children grow up weaker. Today, we might call it “helicopter parenting.”
Is there a plant—or a person—in your life that might do better if you stepped back a little?
Who Was Mokichi Okada?
Mokichi Okada (1882–1955) is known today for a farming method that uses no fertilizer at all, and for a large body of writing on health, art, and how people ought to live. In 1952, he opened the Hakone Museum of Art.
Read the Original
The full text, written by Okada in Japanese in 1953, is available on meshiya.jp.
