By the summer of 2019, Jodianne’s conditions had completely engulfed her, robbing her of the joy she wanted to feel during a trip to France. Jodianne was invited to Paris to shoot a yoga retreat. A big step in her photography career, she was all smiles while snapping the pictures. When she returned to the solitude of her hotel room, however, Jodianne found herself breaking down. “Being there, I found myself in a cloud of darkness. I would do the shoot and be happy around everyone, but when I was by myself I would just cry and tell myself I don’t deserve to be there and ‘who do you think you are.’ There was lots of third-person negativity in my head.”

Despite her successful photography career, a new podcast in production, and travel opportunities, Jodianne was heavily suicidal. “Coming back [from Paris], something had to change. I’m in Paris, I should be happy, I should be grateful. I came back, [and] knew something was wrong but didn’t really know how to fix it. I was just very sad.”

While mental health is often a topic swept under the rug in Black households, Jodianne’s Jamaican mother could no longer avoid the fact that her daughter was struggling. Her mother Carmen, who goes by the nickname Tattie, has been gardening her whole life, winning awards for her work throughout Jodianne’s childhood. Despite Jodianne never showing an interest in gardening, Tattie convinced her daughter to leave the house by asking her to help create a stone pathway in the garden. Working side-by-side with her mother, Jodianne wasn’t aware that she was simultaneously laying down the initial stones on her pathway to self-healing — all she knew was being outside made her feel lighter. “I didn’t connect right away to whether it was the earth and soil, if it was being outside in the fresh air, or if it was the plants, but I knew being outside in the garden made me feel better each time. I would start asking my mom. I was excited to go and I would start initiating. I wanted to bring that feeling inside.”

Jodianne’s plant collection started with a singular snake plant she named Tyrone. By the end of the month, she had 12 plants. Continuing this exponential growth, she eventually became a plant parent to 94 plants in her bedroom alone. Looking back on the transition of her bedroom from white “asylum” walls to an indoor green oasis, Jodianne sees it as a reflection of her self-care journey. “My room was so white and bare. There was nothing on the walls. My room reflected how I felt inside — empty. Now, my room is so full of life, things are growing and it made me look at myself and realize I'm growing. I’m not perfect. I have bruises just like my plants but I’m healing, growing, learning, and I’m patient with my growth.”

Jodianne started Noire Girls Plant as an Instagram page in August 2019 to share photos of her plants. As her page gained traction, Noire Girls Plant blossomed into something much bigger — a community and a business centred around plant care and personal healing.

While it continues to evolve, Jodianne aims to ensure Noire Girls Plant is always a reflection of her and her journey. From the logo featuring a Black woman with an Afro to the names she gives her products, one can easily sense Noire Girls Plant is a product of love — both the self-love she’s learned to foster and the love poured into her from those around her. The first product Jodianne created was Tattie’s Chunky Soil Mix, an indoor potting soil lovingly named after her mother. “I called it Tattie because we’re so closely connected to Earth. Soil is literally what feeds us. We need soil to grow food. I felt like my mom is someone who fed me my whole life, starting from her womb to the love and advice she gives me. She gives a lot of herself to others and to me and I wanted to honour her in that.”

Alongside selling various products such as essential oils and affirmation cards, Noire Girls Plant also offers the Rooted Workshop which aims to help participants see a physical representation of their self-love journey. Using biodegradable paper, participants write affirmations, goals, or kind words — anything they want to foster and grow for themselves. In biodegradable form, their hopes are then inserted into the soil of their newly sown plant, and participants slowly watch their wishes simultaneously grow with their plants. Jodianne hopes to pass on the many lessons she’s learned about self-care and mental health, one of the biggest being patience and compassion for yourself no matter where you are in your journey. “Plant care has taught me patience with myself. It’s taught me that things happen when they’re supposed to happen. I love that plants are just as they are — they don’t judge themselves. They may look a certain way but they just accept it.”

As a self-described perfectionist, it was actually her experience with plant infection that helped Jodianne cope with the lack of control she felt after her diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a more intense type of premenstrual syndrome that can cause severe psychological symptoms weeks before menstruation. Thinking about how she cares for her plants, Jodianne decided to give herself the same kind of love and patience. “If a plant is infected, there are different ways to treat it. We spray it, we clean it, we wipe it down, but we’re doing all that work. The plant knows it's infected, it knows it needs care, it knows it's going to be taken care of at a certain point in time whether nature is going to do it or it’s going to be the owner… I see that as a representation of myself. I’m healing. I know there’s something ‘wrong’ but I’m trying to be patient with that healing. I know it’s going to happen, I’m not rushing the journey. But the fact is, it's a process. I’m not going to let that infection take over to the point where I’m giving up. It takes time.”

But what happens if the infection takes over and you’re not able to save your plant? For Jodianne, the death of a beloved plant simply teaches us about the cyclic nature of life.

“You learn to let go and understand that the plant has passed on and it's okay to start over, just like in life. It’s okay to start your goals over again as long as you put your heart into it and you’ve done the best you can. That’s what’s most important.”

Plant care also rejuvenated Jodianne’s connection to spirituality. Growing up in a Christian family, Jodianne never considered herself a religious person, seeing traditional religion as divisive. In tending to her plants, however, Jodianne found a spiritual perspective that finally resonated. “I’m more about relationships, so a relationship with God is much more important… Prayer is important, but I wasn’t connecting with that. I was connecting with nature. I felt like God gave me nature to guide me to him.”

Emphasizing the beauty of change and new cycles, one of the guiding principles of Noire Girls Plant is ‘connecting with your seasons of growth’. Just like seeing beauty in deciduous trees losing leaves in the fall — a necessary process for trees to gather enough nutrients to survive the harsh winter — there is also beauty in doing whatever is necessary for your mental health no matter what that may look like at the time. In Jodianne’s words, this principle “is really about being okay with growth, taking a chance and stepping into that fear of the unknown… We’re growing continuously, we’re blooming, we’re changing, and we’re shedding.”

Though the name Noire Girls Plant started as a tribute to Jodianne herself, swapping the word ‘Black’ for ‘Noire’ as a nod to a second trip to Paris she took for her 30th birthday, the name now encompasses the community Jodianne actively uplifts: Black women. Ensuring her workshops are a safe place for women of colour, Jodianne aims to remind Black women that they can take up space in nature despite the time-old adage that the outside is “just for white people.” Instead, she challenges this seemingly diasporic notion by emphasizing that Blackness has always been rooted in nature. “It’s where we started. Mother Earth — Africa. Scientifically, we all literally come from Africa. Everything starts in Africa… We are so negative about outdoor stuff: ‘Oh, we don’t go hiking. We don’t go camping. That’s white people stuff.’ Where do you think camping comes from? We hunted for our food and we would hunt overnight. We would hike.”

Nature also allows Black women a break from stereotypical depictions in mainstream media: loud, angry, and rough. In the limelight of these stereotypes, Black women can often feel hyper-surveilled, trying to appear ‘proper’ to be taken seriously. In the presence of plants, however, Jodianne finds a break from this tiring act and these harmful stereotypes.“[Noire Girls Plant] is a reminder that it's okay to get dirty. I feel like a few years ago we weren’t and still aren't shown in a soft, powerful way. [We’re shown] more so in an aggressive way, but not soft, powerful, and gentle. When we’re in nature, we are allowed to be all those things — and were always those things, but we may not be shown that way in the masses.”

Jodianne also sees plant care as a way to reclaim the outdoors as we continue to live in the afterlife of slavery. “A lot of people would equate farming and growing things to slavery because that’s what we did for them, not necessarily for ourselves. There’s so much we can do for ourselves, but it’s almost like there’s a subconscious withholding because culturally, it's triggering. But we’re growing out of it with more people growing their own food in a positive way. Doing this labour is helping Black people to take back that power. It’s what we are from back home, it's not just what we’re forced to do.”

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If you’ve been inspired by Jodianne to start your own plant journey, figuring out where to start may seem overwhelming. While it might be tempting to start with the bushiest, most exotic, aesthetically pleasing plants, Jodianne’s advice is to start simple. For beginner plant parents, low-light, tenacious plants might be your best bet. Her top recommendation for a first plant is the very one that kickstarted her plant parenthood: a snake plant. While also naming them Tyrone is completely optional, in Jodianne’s words snake plants are a great first plant because they “aren’t bougie,” meaning they require minimal care. Not only can these plants survive a month or two without water, but they also only require low light. However, don’t make the fatal mistake of thinking low light is no light. “If you live in a basement with no light, get a plastic plant!”

If you prefer a plant with a little more foliage and less snake imagery, Jodianne recommends a Chinese evergreen which can also grow in a low-light environment. They only require watering every two to three weeks and come in various colours if you want to diversify your plant collection without complicating it. Lastly, you can’t go wrong with a cactus, which Jodianne says only needs watering about once a month depending on how much sunlight it gets.

While her own collection has shrunk down since when she first started, the majority of Jodianne’s plants are now on the simpler side: she’s the proud plant parent to multiple snake, ZZ, pothos, and philodendron plants. While she was at first obsessed with getting the “top-of-top” expensive exotic plants, she’s come to realize that she can better care for simple plants — something she is at peace with. If anything, this shift in her plant collection has continued to teach her valuable lessons about mental health and self-care journeys.

“Don’t rush the process — enjoy the journey. Don’t compare yourself and don’t compare what you do have or what you don’t have. Enjoy what you have, respect what you have, and you’ll be surprised with what the outcome is when you do all those things. You will be blessed in many other ways.”

Follow Noire Girls Plant: @noiregirlsplant