“Did you know that Spanish moss in the bromeliad family? The same family as pineapple?”
This was one of my first remarks after emerging from seeing Ethel Cain live at Radio City Music Hall. The experience was absolutely otherworldly. Cain had performed every song from her new album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, as well as five other songs from earlier albums; her vocals were incredible, and the stage and lighting were hypnotic. I felt almost uneasy at the way people stood up throughout the show and cheered loudly between songs. “We’re at church,” I wanted to tell them. “Show a little more reverence.” (This is not to say that I wasn’t also screaming.) My seat was pretty far in the back, and all of my iPhone 12 videos are correspondingly low-quality, but it didn’t matter — I was just so grateful to be experiencing this show. As always, I was thinking about the Ethel Cain lore and the gut-wrenching storytelling of the Willoughby Tucker album, but in the moment, this was pre-empted by thinking about the Spanish moss.
You see, in the spring semester of my freshman year, I took a class in which the final assignment was to write a ten-page paper on a South American plant or environmental issue. I decided to write about pineapple. One of the many things I learned about pineapple is that it belongs to the Bromeliaceae, a family of monocot flowering plants found mostly in the tropics of the Americas. Some species, known as tank bromeliads, collect pools of water in their broad leaves, which make perfect homes for insect larvae and tadpoles. But another, more familiar bromeliad has thin, scaly, grayish-green leaves that hang down from trees (usually live oaks and bald cypresses) in long chains. This is Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), a recognizable fixture of the American South — and, confoundingly, it is neither a moss nor Spanish. Instead, it’s native to the tropics and subtropics of North and South America, and like many bromeliads, it’s an epiphyte — a plant that grows on another plant and draws water and nutrients directly from the air around it. One might mistake the plant for a parasite, but Spanish moss does not harm the trees it grows upon. It’s just hanging out.
Why do I explain all this? On the Willoughby Tucker Forever stage, Spanish moss featured prominently, hanging down in huge garlands from rafters overhead. This serves to aesthetically immerse the show in the fictional Ethel Cain character’s Alabama hometown, where the entirety of Willoughby Tucker and the first few songs of Preacher’s Daughter are set (yes, that includes “Waco, Texas” and “A House in Nebraska” — as it turns out, Ethel is meant to be in Alabama just thinking about these other locations). I am taking a course on systematic botany this semester, and I’ve come to appreciate plants a lot more in my time at Connecticut College. So I was intrigued by the contributions of this elegant epiphyte to the ambience of the show.
This sent me down a path of botanical pondering. The stage was decorated with other plants as well, such as a green bush that framed the mic stand and a soft carpet of reeds stretching out below the main platform. Unfortunately, due to my own distance from the stage and the style of Ethel Cain’s tour photography, I have struggled to identify these species. (If anyone has insights, please let me know.) Beyond the direct imagery, I’ve also started to ponder the plants mentioned in the Willoughby Tucker album.
First and foremost, of course, are nettles — with “Nettles” being the title of the lead single and fourth track of the album. The word is never uttered in the song’s lyrics, but referenced in the lines “Lay me down where the trees bend low / Put me down where the greenery stings.” The common nettle or stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) belongs to the family Urticaceae, which encompasses over 2,000 species of wind-pollinated eudicot flowering plants. Despite their needle-like stinging hairs, called “trichomes,” that make them quite unpleasant to the touch, nettles are not entirely hostile creatures. The young leaves are edible if boiled, and they have historically been used for a number of medicinal purposes. The fibers of the stinging nettle can also be used to produce a linen-like textile. In fact, one etymological theory holds that the word “nettle” originates from an Indo-European word meaning “to twist together” because of the plant’s long history of being woven into fabrics. In the Ethel Cain song, nettles are a metaphor for being outwardly mean and pain-inflicting as a means of protecting herself, allowing her to survive harsh circumstances despite her vulnerability — but questioning how she can be loved through this defensiveness. The line “To love me is to suffer me” is repeated twice in the song, and I can’t really express how much this lyric and this entire song have emotionally devastated me. Most of my June was a haze of “Nettles” on an endless loop. This deserves an essay of its own. But my point here is, it makes me happy to learn that Urtica dioica actually does have a number of beneficial uses, beyond its tendency to inflict pain.
Then, in the final lyrics of “Nettles,” another plant is mentioned: gardenias. In a convenient twist for anyone who’s bad at remembering scientific names, the Latin genus name for gardenias is Gardenia. They belong to the family Rubiaceae, which notably also includes Coffea (the coffee plant) and Cinchona (the tree historically cultivated for quinine, an antimalarial compound). The genus Gardenia includes over 100 species native to the tropics and subtropics of Africa, Asia, Australia, and Pacific Islands. We can surmise that Ethel is probably referring to Gardenia jasminoides, the most widely cultivated species in warm climates around the world, desired for its large, fragrant white flowers. Gardenias are the favorite flower of the character’s mother, Vera Cain. The line “Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who” conveys Ethel’s love for Willoughby while hearkening back to the themes of intergenerational relationships and trauma that are a recurring theme in the Preacher’s Daughter album. Perhaps the plant itself speaks to the inescapability of one’s origins — according to a web page from the Missouri Botanical Gardens, “gardenias resent root disturbance.”
The other botanical reference on Willoughby Tucker is a lyric from the sixth track, “Dust Bowl.” This song draws upon the bleak imagery of the time period for which it is named — an era of American history characterized by intense dust storms. In the 1930s, the Great Plains region experienced large-scale wind erosion due to a combination of drought and unsustainable agricultural practices. Historically, the roots of the native grassland had held the soil in place, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of these grasses had been replaced by crop fields or overgrazed by cattle. In many places, farmers had overplanted in an effort to survive a period of steeply falling prices. Even worse, cotton fields were left bare over the winter, leaving large swaths of dirt exposed to the open air. The result was an environmental and public health disaster that must have seemed biblical to those within it, considering events like the Black Sunday Dust Storm of April 14, 1935. One may read this as a parable on the importance of protecting native plants and ecology.
Now, Ethel Cain never explicitly describes how the environmental devastation of the Dust Bowl in her metaphor for Ethel and Willoughby’s misery, but I would imagine such events played a role in Willoughby’s spiral. In “Dust Bowl,” she sings, “tend to the row of your violets” — a welcome shoutout to the diverse genus Viola, containing over 600 species of eudicot flowering plants, some perennial and some annual. Many of these species are native to the U.S., but the most widely cultivated species, the common pansy (Viola x wittrockiana), is introduced from Europe. However, I imagine Willoughby would opt for native species such as Viola sororia. Later in the album, on the penultimate track “Tempest” (the only song written from Willoughby’s perspective), the line “pick your flowers” reinforces the botanical inclinations of Ethel’s first great love. I imagine Ethel and Willoughby are now a happy middle-aged couple growing a big garden somewhere and nothing bad has ever happened to them. Allow me to imagine this, please …
Seeing Ethel Cain live was a truly incredible experience. I found myself feeling a bit anxious, as I sometimes do at concerts, that I wasn’t preserving this memory properly, that I needed to film every second of this experience but also film nothing so I could live in the moment. But I have to accept that there is no way to press a memory perfectly. It will be overgrown someday, obscured by moss and vines, intertwined with connections to other moments in the dendrites of my brain. Plants are endlessly perseverant. And for this, I’ve come to appreciate them immensely.