Try pulling a dandelion from your lawn. Really pulling it. You can’t. The taproot goes down deeper than the flower goes up.
That’s the whole architecture.
Recovery came in a Buddhist community in Thailand, 2013. I’d resurfaced five years earlier under my real name — first time in fifteen years. An ethnobotanist called Frank Cook had told me: you need to be teaching plants. Frank died young. But the instruction stuck. I built Eatweeds from that conversation.
And I didn’t build it by asking “how do I sell foraging courses?”
I built it by asking: what change am I trying to make in the world?
The answer: to see wild plants used as food and medicine in every household in Britain.
That’s it. Those are the roots. Everything else — the messaging, the audience, the pricing — follows from that clarity. When I had it, the work sharpened. I wasn’t flogging a product. I was building a bridge.
This was the difference between balsam and comfrey. My first two businesses had flowers — impressive ones. But no roots. No mission underneath. No clarity about the change I was making or who I was making it for. Just tactics, executed brilliantly, rooted in nothing.
Eatweeds had roots first. And everything grew from them.
Every expert I’ve worked with makes the same mistake. They start with the flower — the book, the online course, the website, the launch plan, the funnel — and they skip what’s underneath.
The roots are the bit nobody wants to do. Not because it’s hard — because it’s uncomfortable. It demands a kind of ruthless clarity that most people would rather avoid.
What change are you trying to make? What specific shift are you responsible for in the lives of the people who trust you?
The dandelion doesn’t survive because of its flower. It survives because of what’s underneath.
The problem was never the flower. It was always the roots.