---

Takahata-fudo

by Meridel Newton

If you walk far enough along the old Keio line rail tracks to the west of the crumbling city, you eventually reach a steep hillside covered in blue and purple flowers, host to a beautiful wreck of a temple. The flowers are always blooming, and the temple seems somehow arrested in time, caught between its former glory and the genteel decay that afflicts all human constructs. There’s a stream with clear flowing water and a perfect little retainer pond, and there I’d stopped to refill my water supply when I first met Satou Sekihito, the temple attendant.

It is, of course, unusual for me to encounter anyone at all this far from the city center, much less a lone old man with no weapon but a pushbroom he probably made himself. So I was maybe a little off my guard, which is the only reason he got as close as he did before I heard a soft footfall and whirled around, nearly dropping a precious canteen as I did so.

Picture this, if you will: an old man, thin, but taller than most younger men these days. No mask. He wears a grey robe that was once light blue, and hakama that hangs in tatters around his ankles. He’s wearing tabi, and oddly enough, that’s the detail that relaxes me. You can’t walk very far in tabi, or over any rough terrain at all. This old man probably doesn’t stray far from the temple grounds. He can’t be any threat.

I took in all this at a glance and managed to stop myself from drawing my belt knife. I don’t like being surprised, but I guess this time it was as much my own fault as his. Sometimes the mask blocks the smaller sounds.

“Welcome, honored visitor,” the man said, bowing slightly. He was using keigo, the most formal tone of the language, so old-fashioned I had only the dimmest memories of it from my earliest childhood. I strained through those memories, searching for an appropriate response.

“Please don’t let me impose upon you, Grandfather,” I said, and the moment felt ridiculous, impossible, set strangely out-of-time. I switched back to informality to say, “I only stopped for some water, and I’ll be on my way.”

The man smiled broadly and waved his hand in front of his face–no need, no worry. “Please, help yourself. I don’t often get visitors out here.”

I’ll bet he didn’t. Takahata-fudo might have been only a short train ride from Shinjuku station in the old days, but it was nearly a full day’s walk from the western-most part of modern Tokyo. Pickings were slim out here, as anything worth scavenging had been claimed years ago and brought into the safety of the fortified city. I wouldn’t have come myself, but I’d always had a perverse streak, a tendency to thrill-seek. It had often served me well as a scavenger, but it probably meant my days were significantly more limited than most. I was used to not thinking too far into the future, though. Not even one day ahead, most of the time.

This particular day, I was on my way home after an unsatisfying trip to the older mountain suburbs.

It wasn’t an unusually long trip for me, but I had never ventured so far from the city only to find a solitary human resident, unarmed and unmasked and completely unthreatening. I forgot myself, staring at the old man. It was like I’d been granted a glimpse into a lost, idyllic past. Sometime before the stratobacillus bacteria poisoned our land and our people.

“Please,” he gestured at the small pond. “Don’t hesitate. It’s safe and there is plenty.”

I didn’t need to be told a third time. I turned back to the water and knelt down, dipping the bottle and my fingertips into the freezing water. The man came up beside me as I waited, and I tried to calm my tense nerves. I did not like having an unknown element just outside my field of vision. Instead, I looked around, taking in details I’d missed before: the careful, aesthetic placement of the stones that made up the banks of the pond, an ancient wooden bridge with signs of recent repair, a small neighborhood shrine with faded prayer flags and stacked offerings of pebbles and flowers.

Flowers.

This place was loved. At least one person knew what it used to look like, what it should look like, and worked to restore it.

“Your flowers are lovely,” I said, because I didn’t know how to say, You know your life’s work is pointless, right? When you die there will be no one to care for this place and it will fall to ruin just like everything else.

It was apparently the right thing to say. His face lit up like I had just offered him a bar of fabled chocolate.

“They are blessed flowers, sacred to this place.”

I smiled politely.

“The hydrangea’s kami will save us all,” he pressed. He reached out and gently took one eye-level blue-purple blossom in hand. Without plucking it, he pulled it toward me.

I do not normally have any interest in flowers. They are rare enough, these days, that I notice them as pleasant changes from the blasted grey concrete and black, sludgy canals. But if they cannot be eaten or used or traded, they are not worth even the minimal weight they’d add to my pack. This one, though, I had to admit was worth a second look. Hundreds of softly rounded, blue petals comprised dozens of tiny flowers in a complex geometric harmony; a tiny, perfect little world cupped in those chapped hands.

I certainly don’t have any interest in kami. If there are any still around, they’d never helped me.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. I tried to remember if there was some formal response he was expecting from me—something about gratitude for the wisdom or generosity of the elder, perhaps?—when he let the flowerhead go and it sprang back to its place in the bush.

“This one is almost done its work,” the man said. I did not yet know his name at this point in the narrative, but for the ease of telling, I will refer to him as Sekihito.

“Work?” I asked. And because clean water was so hard to find, I started to fill my spare canteen.

“Next year the blossoms will be purple,” said Sekihito. “The year after that, white. And then the soil will be ready for crops.”

I nearly fell into that perfect little pond. He caught at the back of my coverall with a speed and strength I wouldn’t have thought him to possess and held until I’d regained my footing.

“Elder, you can’t think to grow food out here!”

“Rice, soybeans, three kinds of cabbage. Last year I pickled my own daikon. I’ve been living off my garden for three years now.” The old man smiled widely at me, as though he knew exactly how impossible his claims were. “Want to see?”

“See?” I did want to see. It couldn’t possibly be true; no one had grown anything edible in our scourge-ridden soil in decades. If it did grow, it certainly wasn’t safe for human consumption. Yet here stood this man, older and taller than most, strong, seemingly healthy, and in good spirits.

I had to get going. It would be dark in a couple hours, and my mother and sister would be expecting me tonight. I didn’t want to worry them.

“Yes, please.”

He smiled broadly and waved me over, turning without waiting to see if I followed. The stream and retaining pond were just on the outskirts of the main temple ground; now he led me across a wide, flat plaza of cracked cement and past two large wooden outbuildings. They would have been impressive enough on their own, two stories tall and covered in the type of unnecessary flourishes that spoke to a society with the time for beauty. But towering over them was the the five-storied pagoda of Takahata-fudo. Orange-red and white and green, even faded it was a stunning monument to a better past. At some point in the last decades it had lost its golden finial, but the cross beams and supports contrasted with the white walls, the green details and ornate black lanterns. Staring up at it framed against the clear summer sky, I could almost forget the desolation around me.

And then we reached the gardens. His gardens. Sekihito’s gardens.

The man was, I learned in that moment, a master of understatement. He did not have rice, beans, and three kinds of cabbage. He had acres of rice, trellises of beans, fields of cabbage. Marching up the mountain behind the temple, ranks of hydrangea bushes interspersed with dozens of crops, inter-planted with each other in a wild profusion. In the middle of summer not many were ready for harvest, but even so, I could see the green starts of unripe tomatoes and the skinny sprouts of runner beans, the orange trumpets of gourd flowers, the low flourish of herbs.

For the first time since I’d left Tokyo, I removed my mask. The air was heavy with fragrances, sweet and heady, flowery and green, the dark loam of soil underlying it all. And clean, so clean. No hint of the acrid tang of the bacteria.

I may have cried. I will not admit that for posterity.

“It’s working, you see?” Sekihito said. He led me by the hand to the first row of tilled earth. Not even a raised bed, just the dirt of the mountain, as it was. He ran his ungloved fingers through it and lifted a palm to show me. Rich, black loam. A seed case. A wriggling grub.

I hadn’t seen a real grub in my whole entire life.

“What is– where– how did you do this?” I managed.

He smiled and turned my hand over. The grub rolled from his hand to mine, then dropped to the ground when I wasn’t fast enough to catch it.

“I’m just the caretaker,” he said. “But I’ve been looking after their work for fifty years. And I think it’s finally ready.”

My legs gave out under me and I plopped into the soil. The rich, black, fertile soil. “They?”

He smiled.

---

Over his homemade sembe and a steaming cup of what he claimed was real green tea, Sekihito told me how he came to be the last remnant of the Tokyo Metropolitan Botanical Garden and Nursery’s Bacterial Phage Remediation Project, which was originally founded by his brother-in-law twenty years before the infestation. Originally intended as a cheaper, longer-term solution to a long-forgotten nuclear reactor accident, the Project had experimented with a number of ground coverings and ornamental plants before settling on hydrangeas as the perfect medium to work with. Since they already visibly responded to soil chemistry with the color of their flowers, they completely negated the need for an expensive, hard-to-source sensor to check their progress. With some careful tweaks to their DNA, and several resolute generations of crossbreeding to strengthen the trait, the project should have resulted in a beautiful solution to the problem of soil contamination via radiation: plants which preferentially took up and captured harmful ions, encasing them in hard wooden knots close to the stem to seal them away from the world. The flowers grew darker each season to indicate the scarcity of the particles, and then bone-white when a full season passed without any at all. After their white year, they returned to their natural behavior, lavender and blue and purple. Their broad, spreading root systems meant that a single plant could clear an entire yard in ten years.

It was an elegant solution. A beautiful one, really. But it was a solution for a problem that was quickly outmoded. At its peak, one radioactive site could have been cleared by the Project’s greenhouse. The bacterial infestation that destroyed the city my parents knew was an entirely different problem. It was too sudden, too comprehensive, too immediate a problem to meet with flowers. In those chaotic days, the focus was on survival and evacuation, the urgent need to figure out how to protect and feed the millions of starving people who fled Tokyo. Japan had lived for centuries on the slim percentage of its land that was low and flat enough to farm; but in those years, the population of the largest city in the world drained into the mountains, and frivolities like government-run botanical gardens were abandoned, the fears of nuclear fallout subsumed to a more immediate threat.

The Project was closed and all available government personnel reassigned to deal with the present emergency. The greenhouses were shuttered, and the budding specimens were left to rot in their pots.

Or so the official reports state.

In actuality, the head of the Project was apparently more far-sighted than the panicking bureaucrats in the Diet at the time. Akihito Fujiwara could not bear to see his efforts go to waste. He knew that his work with hydrangeas still represented the best hope for the city’s future, and he knew that a time would come when they would again be recognized for the versatile tools they were. And Akihito’s brother-in-law had just started his appointment at a temple on the outskirts of Tokyo known for its mountain of hydrangea. While the urban centers emptied, the priests of Takahata-fudo vowed to stay and watch over their temple. Akihito brought them a single pallet of hydrangea hastily modified to sequester bacteria rather than radiation.

Fifty years later, only Sekihito remained of those few brave souls. Carefully tending to the original plants, lovingly cross-breeding them and raising hundreds of daughter trees, he had spent his life on the mission Akihito had left to him. And now, at long last, he deemed them ready–he had a line of hydrangea trees that could cover more area, grow faster, capture more infection than any before, and he had enough to start distributing.

All he needed now was someone to help make his case to the city’s governing Council, such as it was.

And there I was, drinking real matcha and eating vegetables so fresh I’d never tasted the like in my life. I wanted my sister to know what green tea tasted like. I wanted my mother to have her favorite glazed pumpkin dish, which I’d grown up hearing her lament that she’d never get to eat again. I wanted to know the joy of a green, flowering city, and a people unafraid to dig their fingers into the soil and breathe.

I agreed to help.

---

“Rina! Welcome back!”

My mother waited for me at the door of our building, as she always did on the days she knew I expected to return. I grimaced to myself. It was later than I’d ever been, well after midnight. I’d hoped she’d fallen asleep waiting, but apparently the worry for her oldest daughter was too potent.

“Mama, I’ve returned,” I announced. Removing my mask, I gave her a small bow, and then a deeper one as the guilt ate at me. “Sorry for the delay.”

“Is everything okay, Rina?” she asked. “Sanae said you had probably found a place to wait until morning, but I knew you would be back tonight. You always keep your word.”

I bit my lip. Her kindness only ground the guilt deeper. “I’m fine, Mama. Better than fine. I’m… oh, Mama! I have so much to show you! Wake Sanae!”

“Wake?” She rolled her eyes. “You think your sister sleeps when I don’t? I sent her to bed hours ago, but I promise she’s been watching for you.”

At that very moment, footsteps pounded down the stairs and I felt my heart lift.

“Sis! Wait there, we’re coming!” I called up to her before dropping my voice to address my mother. “Let’s get inside, and be sure to lock the door. I have to show you…”

“What?” Mama let herself be ushered in, but waved me off so she could lock up herself. “Did you find the jars I asked for?”
The jars. In my excitement over the temple, I’d completely forgotten the disappointing results of the start of my scavenging trip. “Better, Mama.”

“Better?” She paused to look me over curiously even as I tried to wave her upstairs and Sanae called impatiently from the top of the steps.

“Come on!”

Our apartment was one unit out of four in a restored pre-scourge building in the heart of the old Itabashi neighborhood of Tokyo. The lobby served as an initial defensive gate and bottleneck on the street level. To get to the living quarters, you climbed a winding staircase to the third floor and passed through two more locking gates before reaching the reinforced door to our home.

Despite all the armor, the apartment within was a warm, golden bubble of life filled with trinkets and art, memories of our lives and preservation of the past. Everything I found in my scavenging, I always brought back here to share, and my sister clucked over it all while my mother weighed and judged, marking what we would keep and what we would trade away. The scratched, wooden kitchen table had hosted many a homecoming, though none so strange as this.

My mother and sister piled into the room after me, eyes wide and impatient. I made a show of slinging my pack off my shoulders and stretching, drawing out the moment just a little. With the pack below the level of the table, I carefully removed the one precious seedling in its protective case and set it on the floor beside me.

“Sis,” Sanae started just as my mama said, “Rina.”

I grinned. “I followed the Keio line this time. Went out to the suburbs and old farms.”

Mama’s eyes gleamed. “My jars?”

“Jars. Right.” I pulled out a chair and sat at the table, gesturing for them to do the same. As they sat, I reached into my pack. “Not so many jars, but…”

I handed her the one small, precious jar of pickled daikon Sekihito had given me. She took it with quiet wonder, her eyes wide and appreciative.

“It’s old?”

“New. He made them last year.”

“He?” My sister leaned forward, frowning. The pickles gleamed bright yellow.

I upended the rest of the contents of my pack. Vegetables flooded our modest kitchen table–daikon and carrots and soybeans, the large leaves of a head of cabbage unfurling from its strictures in the bag. And one precious burlap bag of rice, the small brown kernels escaping from loose spots in the weave and adding their own rainfall tattoo to the table.

“Mama,” I said. “I found a farmer.”

---

Even now, the center of the city is a gleaming daydream of concrete and glass, the sun sparkling off thousands of panes, the canals tame and calm in their stone channels. You could believe you were safe, here. You have to look closely to see the spiderwebbing cracks in the windows, nursed along rather than replaced, or the whole sections of wide sidewalk that have been carefully leveled rather than repoured, ground down to almost nothing. There are no koi in the black waters here, but I’m not sure there ever were. It’s a fit place for a scavenger, a carrion crow like me; it does not dare to dream of greenery or a brighter tomorrow.

The city government likes to pretend there’s nothing wrong. It almost works, until they open their mouths.

“It’s a solution without a problem,” Councilor Koike said, squinting down his long nose at me.

“I don’t think anyone in Itabashi would agree,” I said, forcing myself to maintain a calm, reasonable tone. ”Or any of the shitamachi.” Shitamachi had once meant the old town, the small, dense districts that still traced the echoes of the pre-World War II cityscape. Now, it mostly meant any neighborhood the Council didn’t maintain to a near-modern standard. So, 80% of us, give or take.

“The time for it was twenty years ago,” Councilor Hayate said, striking what he seemed to think was a placating tone. He was always looking to make compromises that blunted the effect of any possible solution. “We don’t need it now. We’ve learned to live without it. People are returning to the cities.”

“It wasn’t ready twenty years ago,” I answered. “But it’s ready now! All we need is the Council’s blessing and some time and space to set up a distro.”

“Time and space and money and people. Resources,” Koike said. He was a dour man with thinning hair and a face that reminded me of an egret. “These things always promise to do much with little, and then turn out to need more and more and more. We’ve seen too many of these false promises over the years. We can’t afford another hoax.”

“This one isn’t a hoax!” I wanted to yell my frustration. I wanted to cry. I wanted to tear my hair out. “I’ve seen it! I’ve eaten the food grown there! Daikon! Green tea!”

“We finally have a solid treaty with the western farms,” Councilor Umeda responded. “Those negotiations took years to straighten out, and we had to promise them an exclusive market. What will Otaki say if we start competing as soon as they start running in supplies?”

I stared. The “supplies” he was talking about were mostly tubers, potatoes and hard mountain yams and such that grew in the stony soil of the Kanto range where little else would. They were edible, true, but they were starchy and bitter and the traders overcharged dearly for what little they brought. My mother had despaired over making anything palatable from the little we could afford.

“By ‘competing,’ you mean growing our own food?” I asked, my voice quiet.

“I mean undermining relations with a new trading partner!”

Umeda had family out near Otaki and the mountain farms, and I suddenly had a strong suspicion as to why he had fought so hard for that trade deal, and why everything that had come out of it was so expensive.

Councilor Koike was nodding. “That is true. Expensive, wasteful, and possibly harmful to trade relations. I am sorry, Yazaki, but we will not be putting any resources toward this farce.”

He nodded toward the meeting’s stenographer, whose brush started flying across the piebald sheet of fabric he used in lieu of ricepaper. He bent to the task with a single-minded concentration, like he thought this one endeavor would save civilization. Brush, ink, recycled fabric–none of the tools were the same, yet something about the image reminded me irrevocably of Sekihito’s gnarled fingers curved around a ceramic bowl and the careful, focused way he whisked matcha into frothy perfection.

“Wait,” I called, desperate. “Please!”

Hayate raised an eyebrow at me. “You have something to add?”

“It isn’t just about food. It never has been.” I took a moment to marshal my thoughts. Most of the Councilors were old enough to remember the world we’d lost, if vaguely. I only had stories–the stories my mother had told me, the stories of the elders of the neighborhood. Shouldn’t they be more eager to repair things than I?

“It’s about safety,” I said, trying to sound as pragmatic as possible. “It’s about being able to live without fear. We fear the very dirt beneath our feet. The wind. The floods after rain. Satou is offering us a chance to be free of that, in time. Free of the scourge. A chance to live without fear of our own breath. Can’t you… can’t you see that?”

Councilor Koike narrowed his eyes. “And to do so, you would have us support a man who defrauded the government in a time of crisis?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Those trees were governmental property,” Hayate nodded. “Your Satou Sekihito had no right to take them.”

“It was Fujiwara Akihito who took them,” I said, but I knew it was a weak counter. That wasn’t the point. “And you can’t possibly hold that against him now. The trees would have died when they locked the greenhouses and abandoned them.”

“You don’t know that,” Hayate said mildly.

I stared, at a loss for words in the face of such denial.

“It’s settled, then,” Hayate pronounced. “This body will not be dedicating any resources to a fraudulent thief seeking to steal government resources and profit from false hope. The proposition is foolhardy and dangerous. Dismissed.”

I ground my teeth. There were twenty-three members of the City Council, and only three of them had deigned to even contribute to the discussion. Even Suyoda, Itabashi’s own Councilor, had remained silent as a pillar of stone. “At least vote! You have to vote!”

Hayate tilted his head, as though the idea was a novel one. “Is a vote necessary?”

He looked over the other twenty-two councilors. Not one nodded.

“Then I believe we are all in agreement. I am sorry, Yazaki, but the matter is closed. Thank you for your attendance. Please enjoy the rest of your day.”

Sometimes, the most formal of language can be the most insulting.

---

My mother had made miso soup.

Or at least, she had made soup with soy beans and cabbage and curled bits of green that I could almost pretend were green onions. It was as close to miso soup as any of us had seen in fifty years, and closer than I’d ever seen in my life. The beans weren’t fermented and there was no dashi or tofu, but the broth was dark and aromatic, and I’d never had the real thing, so as far as I was concerned, it was practically the food of the gods.

My mother had invited the whole building. The gates had been left open.

We were the smallest family in the smallest unit, and fifteen more bodies did not fit in our little apartment, so instead everyone was gathered in the outdoor hallway we shared with the Seki family. The Sekis had brought floor cushions to share, while the young children of the Kogane and Meiji families ran up and down the corridor, just excited to be out in a big group without really understanding why. The elders sipped their soup with their eyes closed and sighed wistfully.

“It’s missing something,” Seki Marie said softly.

“Umami,” Kogane Daichi replied. “It’s missing umami.”

“It’s the dashi,” my mother said. “I can’t remember the last time I had any dashi.”

“I made some once,” Seki Marie declared. “When I was little, we did it as a class project. Hours and hours of watching the pot boil for such little reward.”

“If you’d only known,” Kogane Daichi said, shaking his head.

“Rina’s back!” cried one of the Meiji twins, and they both ran to grab my legs before I could even make it to the top of the stairs. “Rina, Rina, did you bring us anything?”

I have known those children since the day they were born, and I’m still not sure which was which. Only they could have lifted my heart so easily after my infuriating interview with the Council.

“Sorry, Tomo, Tama. I didn’t go far today, and I had things to do.”

They pouted up at me and clung while I stumped over to the adults, bringing them both with me. Mama looked up with a knowing expression–she hadn’t thought much of my chances before I left, and could already tell I hadn’t seen any unanticipated success.

“Don’t worry about it, dear. Have a pickle.” She held out the single precious jar Sekihito had gifted me. It was nearly empty already, having been shared amongst the entire building. For a second my mind flashed back to the Council meeting and Councilor Koike’s harping on resources and scarcity before I squashed that treacherous thought.

At least Koike didn’t get any pickles.

“So it didn’t go well?” Sanae had been perched on the waist-high wall that was the only thing keeping the kids from falling to their deaths. Now, she hopped down and came over to take my hand, her eyes big and sad as she looked up at me.

“It went exactly as well as Mama said it would,” I said, trying hard to contain my venom. “Councilor Koike said it would cost too much, Councilor Hayate said it was fake, and Councilor Umeda said it would disrupt trade. All the others didn’t say anything. They didn’t even vote!”

“Not even Suyoda?”

“Especially not Suyoda.” My eyes narrowed. That betrayal cut particularly deep–Suyoda was a long-time friend to my mother, and without her sponsorship, I wouldn’t have had a chance to speak at the meeting. I had thought at least she would support me, for the love of my mother, if nothing else. She had sat at our table, eaten our miraculous brown rice and cabbage, and seen the precious hydrangea seedling.

It sat now on the wall near where Sanae had perched, drinking in the late afternoon sun. We’d freed it of its protective case and carefully watered it. My mother had dithered over replanting it in one of the many empty pots on the street–something about bad luck and thievery and feeding the spirit–and Sanae had declared her intention to make a new pot just for it. It looked smaller and sadder than I remembered, away from all its sisters. The only green thing in a city of cracked glass.

“So what do we do now?” Sanae asked.

I shrugged at her, but I looked up at my mother. She had warned me that the Council was a waste of time, that they wouldn’t help, that they had little time for the shitamachi. But she seemed no more cheerful now to have been proven right, nor any less pleased than when I had first come home.

“Mama?”

She rose from one of the low cushions, waving off all offered help and levering herself up the wall. She toddled across the hallway to the seedling and smiled down at it, looking as fond as she did when looking at me or Sanae. She reached out and gently touched one tender green leaf on the twig.

“If the Council will not help, then we will do it ourselves,” she said. “We will finish what Fujiwara started and what Satou steered so faithfully. We will make the city bloom.”

“Ourselves?” I said, doubtfully at first.

But then I thought back to Takahata-fudo, the temple and the mountain with its tumbling, verdant garden of flowers, and I thought again of Sekihito’s passionate dedication. If he could dream of a better future, why shouldn’t I? If he could spend his life calmly, patiently growing flowers, knowing that someday they might save all of Tokyo, if not all of Japan, then maybe I could dare to see myself as something more than a scavenger in the moment, a short-lived carrion crow picking at the bones of a dead civilization. Maybe I could think to build something. Maybe I could dream of a future with flowers. With vegetables. With clean, free air and pure, sweet water.

---

If you walk far enough along the old Keio line rail tracks into the crumbling city, you eventually reach an old neighborhood of twisting, narrow streets covered in blue and purple flowers. The flowers are always blooming, and the neighborhood seems somehow arrested in time, ringing with the laughter of children and the gossip of the elderly. There’s a canal with clear flowing water running beside the street, where the gnarled roots of the hydrangeas emerge from the rich dark soil to drink deep. And if you linger long enough, you will meet me, or Sanae, or my mother, or Daichi or Marie or Tama or Tomo or any one of dozens who will offer you some rice or some green tea, and teach you how to grow hydrangeas in your own ravaged soil.

---

Host Commentary

And we’re back! Again, that was “Takahata-fudo”, by Meridel Newton, narrated by Alexandra Rose.

About this story, Meridel Newton says:
Takahata-fudo is a real place on the western outskirts of Tokyo. The mountain and the hydrangeas are real too, though as far as I know they’re not actually genetically modified in any way. This story was originally started as a tribute to the beauty of the temple and its surroundings. Over six years of writing, it turned into something both more personal and more grand in scale than I could have expected.

And about this story, I say:
This is such a beautiful story of flowers and communities and hope. I have always loved hydrangeas, which tend to grow well out here in Portland. And as the story mentions, certain types of hydrangeas produce pink flowers in basic soil and blue flowers in acidic soil–although a quick duck duck go search suggests there are a few other factors as well. Anyway, we tend to have more acidic soil here, and therefore are more likely to see the beautiful blue blooms around town.

But I really liked the idea that the hydrangeas could be genetically modified for a new purpose, to rid the soil of a harmful bacteria. I’m sure there could be other, less attractive ways to deal with this issue, but using hydrangeas gives the story a beautiful symbol of hope to follow. We first see the entire hillside of hydrangeas by the temple, then the one small sprig in the city apartment, and finally the closing image of the recovering neighborhood full of blue and purple flowers.

If you, too, liked this lovely story of communities surviving after an apocalypse, then go check out Meridel’s Shelter Trilogy of novellas from Interstellar Flight Press, of which the second novella, titled “The Present Day By Day”, just came out.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

How do you share it, you ask? Well! In addition to your social media of choice, consider rating and/or reviewing us on podcast listening sites. More reviews makes for more discoverability makes for more Escape Pod for you.

Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members. So! If you enjoyed our story this week then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that dream of a future with flowers.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Michael Pollan in “Second Nature”, who said:
“Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn’t necessarily expect to witness.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.