“Bloom where you’re planted,” you whisper to the water lily seed as you cast her into the sweet rich earth of a tallgrass prairie, no open water in sight.

A foundational idea in seed collecting is the existence of seed transfer zones: regions within which plants can be transferred with a great likelihood of successful propagation. Sure, hoary tansyaster – Machaeranthera canescens – grows across the West. But evidence shows that seeds collected from North Dakota’s glacial plains are unlikely to survive long in Arizona’s semi-arid highlands. If we’re thoughtful about where a population comes from and the condition to which that population is adapted, we should have a better outcome when reseeding that population in restoration projects.

This idea is challenging for me in our current era. Not the idea of transfer zones; I understand how plants adapt deeply to an ecosystem. Plant species move around pretty slowly all things considered. Birds and bears and other animals scatter their seeds, sure, but they don’t have wings or legs of their own.

Here’s what challenges me. The climate is changing, warming quickly. Precipitation patterns are less reliable. Some of our coworkers in New Mexico are dealing with fires and floods, and others are experiencing the leftovers of Hurricane Beryl. Every month is the hottest month on record. It’s hard to understand what this means for seeds, who have spent millennia adapting to more predictable environments. There is a real possibility that a lot of the species we’re collecting now won’t survive these fast changes, and for me the instability of all of this seems like it would really impact the idea of a transfer zone.

But there, dense bunches of threeawn grass growing densely through cracks in the hot Tucson asphalt. Bushes of mock vervain erupting in the rubble where Southwestern canyons were detonated for mining projects or to build the border wall. Cheerful sunflower – never a species to be contained – filling up the highway margins and spilling down the railroad easements. Understanding where a plant can thrive, in which conditions a species can survive, is far beyond my job description and personal intellect.

There’s probably some wisdom here about how we’re all in our own version of transfer zones, with places where we are more likely to grow and thrive, and places that would wither us immediately. I’ll leave you to decide what this analogy means for you. I’m personally very excited to be in the Sonoran Desert, where ferns grow next to cacti and yucca, where I can grow in my experiences of plant identification and understanding the diverse ecosystems of the Coronado National Forest (which has low desert and alpine forest and oak scrubland and everything in between). I can’t be sure, but I think I’m planted somewhere I’ll bloom.