“When I’m eating perilla,” she says, “I’m thinking of all my ancestors.”
Among the plants Park helped to nurture was a Korean variety with palm-sized, heart-shaped leaves grown by farmer Kristyn Leach, founder of Second Generation Seeds. The variety’s name, 38N, comes from the latitude that divides North and South Korea and also happens to pass through Leach’s Namu Farm in Sebastopol, California.
Leach was born in Korea but was disconnected from its culture and traditions after being adopted and raised in the U.S. When she wanted to begin growing Korean foods to help rebuild what she’d lost, perilla was her first choice, even though she’d never tasted it. “It felt like the equivalent of flying a Korean flag,” she says. Fifteen years later, she grows six varieties.
Leach enjoys perilla in its common Korean form—piled high and used as a wrapper through the course of a meal—but she also adds it to sandwiches and pizza, and her daughter puts it on “everything,” she says. “We’re pretty enthusiastic about the gospel of perilla.”
Perilla nourishes pollinators, too. When a field of perilla flowers in late summer, it becomes a veritable buffet for bees, several of which buzzed around Takahashi’s garden. (It is, however, toxic to grazing animals.)
Birds also flock to perilla. Leach knows the nutritious seeds are ready to gather when she enters a patch in fall and hundreds of birds take flight. Watching migratory birds visit a field of perilla, she can’t help but think about the Asian diaspora—a word whose Greek roots mean to scatter or sow seeds.
“None of us are where we’ve historically been,” she says.
For communities removed from their ancestral lands, many of whom have had their tether “strained or severed,” perilla holds great power, Leach says. “There’s something somatically freeing about sitting in the presence of these plants.”
Perilla is a welcoming presence for Thao Tran, a farm organizer at Resilient Roots Farm in Camden, New Jersey, where Vietnamese elders garden alongside local youth. In addition to produce for the community, the farm grows seeds for Truelove. Among them is lá tía tô, a bicolor perilla used medicinally through steeping or steam inhalation, and in cooking for its herbaceous qualities. It’s frequently found beside a bowl of pho and sometimes stuffed with meat.
When Tran works with it, she’s reminded of the elders served by Resilient Roots, who were displaced from their homes and resettled in the U.S. as refugees. She considers what they must have felt when they arrived in a foreign and often inhospitable land and encountered something so familiar and useful as perilla.
“I wonder if that supported them in the process of finding home and community here,” Tran says. “I would imagine that there was a sense of comfort when they were like, ‘This grows really well here,’ and they could see themselves in perilla in that way.”
Perilla’s nature is complicated, Tran says. It can be aggressive, prone to overtaking a garden. In that way, it earns its label as an invasive species. But viewed through a different lens, she sees that same trait as a mark of resilience.
“The plant evades capture or complete erasure because it is very difficult, once the seed bank is established, to actually get rid of it,” she says.
A zine that Takahashi made for the ice cream party, encouraging garden visitors to interact with the perilla. (Photo credit: Kat Arazawa)
When beginning research for the Perilla People’s Garden, Takahashi visited the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, next to the art museum, to explore its herbarium. She found several samples of perilla from the Pittsburgh region, some dating back more than a century.
“It’s been here a long time,” she says. “It’s naturalized at this point. How much time needs to pass before it’s accepted that it lives here?”
Although Takahashi has spent years tangling with questions about invasiveness, immigration, and colonization in her study of perilla, she’s just scratching the surface. The plant is “its own footnote,” she says, always leading her to new sources of knowledge.
As fall progresses, the perilla in the People’s Garden will begin to set seed, giving visitors a view of their natural cycle. Takahashi sees the seeds as another dimension of the plant—a food in its own right, and the beginnings of next summer’s garden. She wants this to be the first iteration of her work on perilla, opening the door to further conversation and exploration in years to come. Someday, she’d like to turn the project into a book.
“I have even more questions,” Takahashi says. “I want to continue to work with the plant. There’s so much more to learn.”
