Seeds of Hope: Sweetgrass

Grow • Learn • Connect • Share

Seeds of Hope is a series of free, plant-focused health and wellness events designed to turn knowledge into practical opportunities. Each event focuses on a plant I have been growing, researching, and developing through my Plant Profiles and Wellness Profiles.

This event focuses on Sweetgrass (Hierochloë odorata, also known as Anthoxanthum nitens), an aromatic perennial grass native across parts of North America, including Ontario.

Sweetgrass is especially interesting because its story goes far beyond nutrition or simply growing another plant. It has a distinctive sweet fragrance, a long history of practical uses, and deep cultural and ceremonial significance for many Indigenous Peoples.

Seeds of Hope gives us an opportunity to learn about the plant while also understanding that respect for a plant includes respect for the cultures and traditions connected to it.

What Will We Explore?

This is an open-chat event, not a formal classroom. Come with questions, experiences, or simply curiosity.

Together, we'll explore Sweetgrass, including how to recognize it, how it grows, its aromatic compounds, its traditional and practical uses, and what is known about the plant from a health and wellness perspective.

Sweetgrass contains coumarin, one of the compounds responsible for its characteristic sweet scent. This also gives us an opportunity to talk about an important part of my Wellness Profiles:

Natural doesn't automatically mean something should be eaten or used without limits.

Unlike Sweet Basil, Dandelion, or some of the other plants in Seeds of Hope, Sweetgrass isn't a plant I want to present primarily as a nutritional food.

Instead, it provides an opportunity to explore a broader meaning of wellness.

Wellness can include nutrition, but it can also include growing, learning, working with our hands, spending time with plants, creating something, connecting with others, and slowing down enough to experience the world around us.

Understanding and Respecting Sweetgrass

Sweetgrass has important cultural and spiritual significance among many Indigenous Peoples, including its use in ceremonies, medicines, braiding, and traditional crafts. Those traditions vary between Nations and communities and shouldn't be reduced to a generic wellness activity.

I am not presenting Seeds of Hope as a way of teaching Indigenous ceremonies or claiming traditions that are not mine to teach.

We can, however, respectfully learn about the plant, acknowledge its significance, and understand why cultural context matters.

That distinction is important to me.

Learning should create greater understanding and respect, not erase where knowledge and traditions come from.

Growing Sweetgrass

Sweetgrass also gives us something different to explore from many of the other plants in the Seeds of Hope series.

Once established, it is a perennial grass that can spread through underground rhizomes. That means propagation isn't limited to starting new plants from seed; established plants can also be divided.

We'll talk about how Sweetgrass grows, what conditions it prefers, how it spreads, and what to consider when growing it in containers.

For someone with limited space, containing a spreading plant can actually be useful. A container allows us to manage where the plant grows while still producing material that can be harvested responsibly once the plant is established.

What If You Don't Have a Garden?

A major purpose of Seeds of Hope is creating opportunities for people who don't have traditional growing spaces.

What if you live in an apartment?

What if you don't have a backyard?

What if you have only a balcony, windowsill, grow light, shelf, or small indoor growing area?

What if you're struggling financially and purchasing specialized gardening equipment isn't realistic?

We'll openly discuss what is practical and what isn't.

Not every plant is equally suited to every indoor environment, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. Part of learning about a plant is understanding its requirements and deciding whether it makes sense for your circumstances.

Where indoor growing is practical, we'll explore those possibilities. Where outdoor or seasonal growing makes more sense, we'll talk about that too.

Growing Doesn't Have to Mean Buying Everything

For anyone who wants to start growing, we'll explore ways of reducing unnecessary costs.

Suitable recycled materials can sometimes become growing containers. Instead of automatically purchasing new pots and equipment, we can look at what is already available and determine what can safely and practically be reused.

We'll discuss containers, water, light, plant division, ongoing care, harvesting, and ways of keeping Sweetgrass growing for future seasons.

This is part of the larger Seeds of Hope idea:

Use what we have.
Learn what we need.
Share what we know.
Reduce barriers wherever we can.

From Growing to Creating

Sweetgrass also connects directly with another area I am beginning to explore: what can we create from the plants we grow?

I have been learning more about plant-based cordage, weaving, baskets, and other practical uses of plant materials.

That opens another door.

Growing doesn't always have to end with something being eaten.

A plant can become an opportunity to learn a skill.

Working with natural materials can provide a creative activity. Someone might discover that they enjoy growing but someone else might discover they love weaving, crafting, or working with their hands.

Someone I introduce to a skill may eventually become far better at it than I ever will.

That's a success.

Seeds of Hope isn't about me becoming an expert at everything.

It's about creating opportunities for people to discover what they might enjoy, learn, grow, create, and eventually share with others.

What Can Begin With One Plant?

For anyone interested in taking the next step, we'll explore practical ways of beginning to grow Sweetgrass and, when possible, ways of making plant material or propagation opportunities more accessible.

You don't have to arrive knowing anything about Sweetgrass.

You don't have to have a garden.

You don't need expensive equipment.

You simply need the willingness to learn.

One seed.
One plant.
One person.
One opportunity at a time.

Sometimes that opportunity may actually begin with a small division from an established Sweetgrass plant rather than a seed—and that itself becomes another lesson about how differently plants grow and reproduce.

That is what Seeds of Hope is becoming.

Not simply a series about plants, but a way of connecting knowledge, accessibility, practical growing, creativity, wellness, community, and opportunity.

Come learn.

Come ask questions.

Come share what you know.

Come discover what might be possible from a plant growing in a small container.

And perhaps, someday, what you learn will become something you can share with someone else.

Love Is For Everyone. Food Is For Everyone. And knowledge is meant to be shared.

Health & Wellness Note: This event provides general educational information about Sweetgrass, growing, cultural context, traditional uses, and wellness. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease. Sweetgrass contains coumarin and should not be treated as an unrestricted food or medicinal product. Cultural and ceremonial practices involving Sweetgrass belong to distinct Indigenous traditions and communities; this event does not teach or claim those practices. Consult an appropriate healthcare professional before using plants medicinally, particularly if you have a medical condition, take medications, are pregnant, or have allergies.