A sentence popped out from my morning pages, my stream of consciousness of 750+ words:
“In my garden, I have set up both trellises and open beds. At sunrise, I water today for tomorrow’s blooms. Climbing jasmine, sunflowers, and trumpet vines.”
I find something wonderful when I let my mind wander through metaphor in the early moments after a night’s sleep. Today, as I tend my own inner landscape, my thoughts drift to the garden—not just one outside my window, but also the ones we tend in our lives where growth (or stagnation) matters.
Can a garden also be a lens through which we can understand the principles of a neuroscience-informed approach to self-organization? Perhaps three plants offer something about how we might nurture potential in our teams…
The Climbing Jasmine: Patient, Fragrant Persistence
Jasmine doesn’t announce itself with bold colors or dramatic displays. Instead, it offers something more subtle and enduring—a fragrance that lingers, a steady climb that transforms whatever it touches. There’s a quiet tenacity in how jasmine grows, wrapping itself around support structures while maintaining its essential nature.
In our teams and organizations, we need people who embody this jasmine energy. They’re the ones who build relationships slowly but deeply, who create psychological safety through consistent presence rather than grand gestures. Their influence spreads not through force but through the quality of connection they cultivate. Like jasmine’s fragrance, their impact becomes apparent over time, creating an environment where others can thrive.
The Sunflower: Bold Orientation Toward Light
Sunflowers possess an observable relationship with their source of energy. They turn their faces toward the light with unwavering determination, growing tall and strong in pursuit of what nourishes them. There’s both boldness and clarity in this orientation—no confusion about what matters most.
Every healthy system needs its sunflowers: those individuals or initiatives that maintain a clear focus on purpose and values. They become beacons for others, demonstrating what it looks like to align actions with deeper intentions. In organizations, these are often the people who can articulate why the work matters, who help others reconnect with meaning when the daily grind threatens to obscure larger purpose.
The Trumpet Vine: Vigorous Reach and Vibrant Announcement
Trumpet vines grow with abandon, reaching boldly into new spaces and announcing their presence with brilliant blooms. They’re the adventurers of the plant world, willing to explore territory others might find uncertain. Their growth can seem almost aggressive in its enthusiasm.
We need trumpet vine energy for breakthrough moments—the willingness to push boundaries, to try new approaches, to make noise when quiet persistence isn’t enough. These are the change agents, the innovators, the ones who aren’t afraid to be seen and heard. Their vibrant presence catalyzes movement in systems that might otherwise remain static.
Trellises and Open Fields: The Architecture of Growth
And here’s what struck me in this morning’s reflection: the garden grows with both trellises and open fields. This isn’t an either-or proposition—it’s a both-and reality.
Trellises provide structure, support, and direction. They create frameworks that enable certain types of growth while preventing collapse under the weight of ambition. In our work lives, these are our processes, our rhythms, our agreed-upon ways of working together. They’re the coaching conversations, the retrospectives, the clear role definitions that help people climb toward their potential.
Open fields, or in my case, really small urban beds, offer space for sprawling, experimental growth. They invite the kind of organic development that can’t be predetermined or controlled. These are our innovation time, our learning laboratories, our permission to explore ideas that might not have immediate business cases but could bloom into tomorrow’s breakthroughs.
A wisdom lies in recognizing when to provide structure and when to create space—and understanding that both are essential for a thriving ecosystem.
Nurturing Seeds for Tomorrow’s Blooms
Another insight from this morning’s metaphorical wandering is the temporal aspect: we nurture the seeds of today for tomorrow’s blooms. Patience is required here, and faith in processes that unfold over time rather than demanding immediate results.
In our achievement-oriented culture, this can feel counterintuitive. We want to see progress now, results today, transformation by the end of the quarter. But gardens teach us that the most meaningful growth often happens underground, in darkness, over seasons we can’t rush.
The conversations we have today with struggling team members might not show results for months. The systems thinking we introduce might take a year to change how decisions are made. The psychological safety we cultivate might not reveal its full impact until people feel secure enough to bring their whole selves to challenges that matter.
Tending the Garden
As leaders, coaches, and change agents, we are gardeners. We don’t control growth, but we can create conditions where it can flourish. We can provide trellises for those who need support to climb, open fields for those who need space to sprawl, and the patient tending that honors both the jasmine’s quiet persistence and the trumpet vine’s bold announcement.
The garden grows with both structure and freedom, nurturing the seeds of today for tomorrow’s blooms. In that patient, faithful tending lies our most important work: creating spaces where human potential can unfold in its own unique way, in its own time, toward its own authentic expression.
What seeds are you nurturing today? What structures are you providing, what spaces are you opening, what patience are you practicing as you tend the gardens entrusted to your care?
If your team’s biggest challenge right now were a particularly stubborn weed, an invasive species, or a pest, what kind would it be, and what unconventional method would you experiment with to attend to it?
