Once the seeds are planted, they’re gonna grow.
Imagine a world where people could heal as easily as flowers grow. Or where flowers could grow as easily as people pick them.
In a world in which it often feels like one is weeding through the chaos of harsh conditions, there are still champions who emerge to plant new seeds. These are the ones who respond to crises with care, who cultivate life where others see loss.
Monique Denny, also known as Mojo, is the founder of Emerge ‘N’ Seed: a homegrown operation where she grows medicine, food, and knowledge, all from her backyard in Houston, Texas. As a paramedic, a plant first responder, wife, and mother of five, Denney started Emergen ‘N’ Seed to help the people she couldn’t reach in uniform
“The only reason I started growing was to help people."
Denney’s experience in nature and healing began with a blueprint passed down by her grandfather, a Vietnam veteran and one of the only Black tech sergeants in the Air Force. After a back injury, he was unable to work and never received disability pay from the military. Still, despite the pain, Denney remembers him walking with a cane through the backyard, always experimenting, raising chickens, and eating from pomegranate trees.
Learning from her grandfather, nature became a retreat for Denney. She learned early on the best seasons to plant seeds and when they would bloom, and this continued to sprout into new interests. As a paramedic for over nine years, Denney found herself constantly tending to the same patients, many of whom weren’t sick because of sudden emergencies, but because of sustained neglect.
During her EMS training, she learned about the Freedom House Paramedics, an ambulance service started by a group of Black Americans and the first emergency medical service in the US to be staffed by paramedics with training beyond basic first aid. Formed in Pittsburgh in 1967, the Freedom House Ambulance Service trained Black men from underserved neighborhoods to provide emergency medical care at a time when no such system existed. Their work laid the foundation for modern EMS born from seeing a need in their community and a desire to help and heal.
“That was the moment I realized I had to find another way to help people.”
Denney's continuation of the Freedom House Paramedics’ legacy lives on in her work as a plant healer, responding not with sirens, but with seeds. Where Freedom House trained first responders to care for the body in crisis, Denney now trains her community to care for themselves with food, plants, and the healing power of soil. Denney’s mission is especially clear in a country where 91 million Americans are unable to afford quality healthcare. Her work offers an alternative path to healing for those left behind.
Being a Black woman in emergency medicine wasn’t an easy experience. Navigating racism, trauma, and burnout in the EMS system is what led her deeper into her garden.
Long before she ever planted a seed, Denney had already imagined a solution. While still working in EMS, she developed a proposal called the Community Paramedic Program, an initiative focused on preventative care, home visits, and support for patients who frequently called 911. According to Denney, the idea was well-received at first, and she was told she’d be offered the role to lead it. However, that opportunity never materialized.
“They gave it to someone who didn’t believe in the program,” she says. “And it completely flopped.”
For Denney, this was a turning point.
“That was the moment I realized I had to find another way to help people.”
Shortly after this, a job-related injury took her off the field. Although she was no longer on the field, the injury brought her into her own backyard where she grew a single cactus that sparked a revelation in community care. Emerge ‘N’ Seed began as a tool for Denney to heal herself, a retreat from the pain that festered after losing her ability to work. From that healing, she began teaching others to do the same.
Seeing the needs of her patients as a EMT, Denney began to share pieces of her garden with her community. Many of the emergencies she responded to were not caused by sudden trauma, but by ongoing neglect bed sores, infections, diabetic wounds, and malnutrition. She began to realize how organic resources could be the healing her patients were never given. One plant in particular, lamb’s ear, stood out as a solution:
“It can help stop a bleed quicker… You can pack a wound with it. That’s how the tribes used it. It has medicine in it.”
Beyond emergency calls, she also saw how food insecurity was often the real crisis:
People are starving, and they could literally sprinkle some seeds in their backyard and just let something grow, and they would never run out of food.”
Denney’s initiative isn’t just to sell plants. She wants to teach people exactly how to grow them and then how to propagate them, so they never have to purchase them again. Her hope is that people don’t return for the same plant but come back for something new because they kept the first one alive. From plant pop-up shops to cultivation checkups, Denney has worked over the last five years to make Emerge ‘N’ Seed a staple for those looking to reconnect with the Earth and reclaim their self-sufficiency.
And where does Houston’s first plant responder see Emerge ‘N’ Seed going?
“I want to plant more emerge ‘N’ Seeds, so that I’m not the only one.”
Her vision is about more than just growing plants. It’s about growing people, growing knowledge, and growing a future where community care doesn’t rely on systems that fail, but on seeds that flourish.
Credits:
Photos: Monique Denney