What we learn from plant resilience

Hotmart
Trooper’s B-Sides EN
5 min readMar 29, 2018

“Whenever a plant is cut or pulled out, it is able to reclaim its space. Plants adapt. They grow where they can, the way they can. They are resilient.” Elisa Nunes, French-Portuguese Translator and UX Writer, learns this every day with nature.

Elisa is the founder and keeper of the project “Treexists”, which showcases, in a different way, plants that are born — or reborn — in places where they aren’t usually expected in the big city scenario, such as walls and pavements, surrounded by concrete where you wouldn’t expect to life to exist.

Her love for nature has followed her since she was a kid. Born in Bambuí, in the countryside of Minas Gerais, the Trooper lived in a big house and played on the streets, outdoors. At the age 12, she moved to a small apartment in Belo Horizonte and could not play outside for security issues. It was then that she asked her mother to buy some plants to make their apartment happier but they soon died. Then, even living at a bigger apartment, she still felt “trapped” and missed having an external area.

Walking around the town and looking at urban environment details, Elisa fell in love with an old abandoned house in the Savassi neighborhood, which was covered in graffiti. She was especially fond of one of the trees, which grew in one of the walls. “Around three years ago, before I even thought about having a project about it, I saw they had painted the house, cut all the plants that had been growing there, including ‘my’ tree. The roots were still sprouting off the wall, and they left only the tree trunk. I got sad because I thought it was gonna die but a month later I walked by and I found out new leaves were growing. I was so happy the three had survived and I wrote the word ‘Resistance’ right below it”, she reminisces.

“The cool thing is that I’ve seen posts of people I’ve never met at this same place. It’s nice to know others identify too.”

Then, our Trooper always took pictures and posted on her personal Instagram account these plants that resist and sprout, spontaneously, in different locations. Since she had a high-posting frequency, her cousin, Ana Lívia Nunes, who also works at Hotmart, suggest creating a profile only for these posts. Elisa thought of a name that gave the resistance idea but, more than that, that showcased the existence of the green in cities like Belo Horizonte, Brazil. So, at the end of 2015, “Treexists” came to existence (@arvorexiste).”

Today, besides the photos, she puts stickers of the project next to the plants. Sometimes, according to the Trooper, when she is back at the places, everything was pulled out. Elisa believes people do this because they feel plants are invading their space when they are in fact just claiming their space back. Even so, people are very receptive to project on social media and expositions she is invited to.

The Trooper tells she always gets messages from people who send pictures of these resistance plants or tag “Treexists” on their posts, which still surprises her due to the fact of the project being created intended only to invite people to stop to look at the green within the urban scenario.

To Elisa, having side projects is essential to bring out her creativity used in her job at Hotmart and in life. She believes that having more than one focus in life is very productive and makes her think in new paths and possibilities. Elisa has even presented a Fast Talk — internal project at Hotmart in which Troopers talk about a topic they master to their peers — about it and has stimulated other people to develop different activities.

The project, today, besides the Instagram profile, stickers and stencils all over the city, also counts on a website, http://arvorexiste.gallery/#en, available in five different languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Arabic), which was developed by the also Trooper Guilherme Pangnotta. Elisa is now thinking about putting up wheatpaste posters around the city and has already called some friends to contribute with ideas, time, and even money. “I don’t intend for Treexists to become a source of income. The whole idea isn’t about that. But sometimes I spend a lot of money, especially on expositions and this ends up becoming a limitation. So, I’m starting to think of ways to come up with collaborations with friends who also like the project or who want something new because I’m always with new projects in my head,” she jokes.

Plants resilience gets back to the focus of the conversation when we ask Elisa about the contribution of “Treexists” to her personal life. “Whenever something bad happens or we think things should be different, we tend to think everything is wrong and that it is the end of the world. Plants, even in the worst case scenario, adapt and resprout, as you can see, the way they can. They always show me that. I try to take that lesson in resilience to my life,” she states.

--

--

Hotmart
Trooper’s B-Sides EN

Hotmart is the most comprehensive platform for those who wish to create a digital business. www.hotmart.com