Braiding Sweetgrass: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Kimmerer describes the sounds of the plants in a growing garden, particularly corn, beans, and pumpkins. She muses on how these plants teach without using words, but rather through their every movement and the gifts that they provide. She remembers a Cherokee writer once gifting her with three seeds: the “Three Sisters,” corn, beans, and squash. These three plants can teach us valuable lessons about how to live, Kimmerer declares.

For thousands of years, Indigenous Americans have planted the Three Sisters together. The European colonists scorned this method upon seeing it, assuming that a productive garden meant uniform rows of crops. At the same time, they couldn’t deny how much food the Indigenous gardens produced.

Kimmerer describes the scientific processes of how these three plants first germinate and sprout: the corn shoots up quickly while the bean plant secures its roots first, and the squash takes its time to germinate. As the corn grows straight and tall, the bean makes a few leaves and then becomes a vine, seeking a support to climb. It latches onto the corn, which is already strong enough to support it, and they grow together. Meanwhile the squash spreads over the ground around them, keeping away pests with its bristly leaves and stems. These are the Three Sisters, and there are many stories of their origins as actual mythical women coming to feed the hungry people in winter.

A Three Sisters garden emphasizes the “lessons of reciprocity,” Kimmerer claims, as the three plants flourish together better than they might apart, each finding its own niche to best receive sunlight and nutrients and protect itself and its neighbors. The Sisters give their gifts to each other and support each other, and the result is a plentiful harvest. Per acre, Kimmerer says, “a Three Sisters garden yields more food than if you grew each of the sisters alone.”

Examining the plants again, Kimmerer describes them as if they were the kinds of human sisters that are familiar to her. Corn is the firstborn who is straightforward and direct, while the bean sister learns to be more flexible. The baby squash sister has no expectations placed upon her and so chooses her own path for the good of the other two. It also might seem like the bean plant takes more than it gives, but this isn’t the case, Kimmerer claims: the bean’s roots not only share water with the roots of the other plants, but also nitrogen. A bean plant can convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into fertilizer that all three of the Sisters can use, via a symbiotic bacteria called Rhizobium, which hides itself in the bean’s roots.

Kimmerer finds it tempting to say that the Three Sisters work together deliberately, and she won’t rule out this possibility. What she is sure of, though, is that they are a reminder of the value of both reciprocity and individuality. Each Sister has her own unique gift, but it’s only when she shares it with the other two that all three best flourish.

Kimmerer teaches a General Biology class, and she says that for years she could not pass on her own enthusiasm for plants to her students. One day she asks if any of them have ever grown anything of their own, and only a few raise their hands. She then realizes that they needed a new teacher: not her, but the plants themselves.

Now Robin begins the same class in a garden, studying the Three Sisters in person. One of her students, an artist, points out the harmonious composition of the three in terms of “unity, balance, color.” To another student, one who is avoiding any dirt, Robin explains how the squash fruits come from flowers, and how they are technically ovaries. The student is disgusted at first, but others are drawn in by the “earthy sexuality” of the garden.

Kimmerer now describes the parts of a corncob, and how each kernel must be fertilized in order to properly ripen, making the corncob “the mother of hundreds.” Beans also grow like “babies in the womb,” each bean nurtured by the mother plant. These plants are also like mothers in the way that they feed and nurture us, Kimmerer says.

In August, Robin holds a Three Sisters potluck for her friends and family. Everyone brings traditional dishes made from the Sisters, and as part of the event they all visit the garden together to gather more of the vegetables at their freshest, emphasizing the plenitude that the Sisters provide. The Sisters also taste good together and each provides valuable nutrition that the others lack, Kimmerer says. A person could not survive on any one of them alone, but together they provide a balanced diet.

Eating dessert at the potluck, Robin observes some nearby fields of corn, all planted in straight rows for maximum efficiency and convenience. The Indigenous practice is to plant gardens to fit the land, while modern agriculture modifies the land to best support its “frighteningly similar clones” of plants. The corn plants in these monocrop fields don’t feel like “sisters,” but more like lonely and anonymous faces lost in a crowd. Furthermore, the lack of diversity in these fields encourages pest outbreaks, which then encourages the use of more pesticides.

The Three Sisters can also act as a metaphor for “an emerging relationship between Indigenous knowledge and Western science, both of which are rooted in the earth,” Kimmerer claims. She sees corn as Indigenous wisdom guiding the curious bean of science, while the squash nourishes an open habitat for both to flourish. In such a relationship, “all may be fed.”

There is ultimately a fourth Sister as well, Kimmerer says: the planter who sows the seeds, waters them, protects them, and harvests them. “We are part of the reciprocity” between the Three Sisters, as we offer our own gifts to them and in exchange receive gifts in return. Kimmerer has had many teachers in her life, she says, but she values her plant teachers as much as any human ones, especially the Three Sisters and their lesson of mutual flourishing.