Mingimingi, Not Orchids: Raising Kids in Intense Times

Many of my worlds collided recently: neurodivergence, parenting and gardening.

This was following reading The Orchid and the Dandelion, which imagines children as either hardy enough to grow anywhere, or so sensitive that flourishing depends on careful conditions and exceptional care.

The orchid and dandelion kids are compelling metaphors, but they have also begun to feel uneasy to my green gardening brain. While the framework has helped many people take sensitivity seriously, it also carries assumptions about what counts as thriving, what kinds of beauty matter, and who must bear the labour of making life liveable for children who do not grow straight or easy.

The orchid/dandelion framework comes from differential susceptibility research, which argues that some children are more affected by environmental conditions, for better and for worse. In its popular form, the metaphor proposes that dandelion children can cope in almost any setting, whereas orchid children need especially careful nurturing to flourish. That claim powerfully contests the old idea that sensitivity is simply a weakness. If only we can support sensitive children to grow, they can be exceptionally beautiful etc.

But the metaphor is kind of limiting. It implies that the task of parenting is to create greenhouse conditions: stable, optimal, carefully calibrated environments in which the sensitive child can bloom. It asks a great deal of parents already living through the cost of living, climate/crisis anxiety and their own forms of everyday exhaustion. The book was also published before the pandemic. Six years later I wonder if the conditions required to raise orchids are not feasible in these increasingly intense times.

These metaphors also carry an aesthetic hierarchy. Orchids are prized because they are spectacular, delicate, cultivated, and recognisable as beautiful according to familiar standards. Dandelions are common, robust, and unremarkable. Even when intended generously, the metaphor sorts children through an old opposition between rare beauty and ordinary toughness. Neurodivergent life often exceeds both categories. I mean weird can also be ordinary right?

Perhaps most importantly, orchids and dandelions are not just neutral plants. They belong to a botanical imagination that is not grounded in Aotearoa (see also the NZ Gardener magazine). Neither gives much help for thinking from the ecological conditions of Aotearoa. For a conversation about neurodivergence in Aotearoa, it seems worth asking what our own ecologies make possible that overseas metaphors miss.

A powerful starting point is Associate Professor Byron Rangiwai’s (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Manawa, Ngāti Whare) reframing of ADHD through a Mātauranga Māori lens. Firstly, he uses the word aroreretini, or “attention goes to many things,” as an alternative to deficit-based framings that treat ADHD only as disorder. But Rangiwai also draws on the pīwakawaka, (fantail), whose quick and seemingly erratic movements provide a way to conceptualise the dispersed, rapid, tangential qualities of ADHD thought.

This matters because it changes the terms of description. The problem is no longer simply that attention fails to stay where institutions want it to stay. Attention can instead be understood as mobile, relational, lively, and differently attuned. The pīwakawaka does not apologise for darting. It survives through that movement.

Sidenote: A pīwakawaka once flew into my house and interrupted a Zoom call when I was working from home. The irony of this distraction/interruption is not lost on me.

The pīwakawaka metaphor also raises another question. If this is one way of understanding the child, what kind of environment best supports such movement? What habitat holds, shelters, and makes room for that kind of life without demanding that it become still?

As a gardener who is obsessed with native plants, I may have an inkling.

Mingimingi is the te reo Māori name applied to several native shrubs, including Coprosma propinqua, Leucopogon fasciculatus and belongs to the wider category of New Zealand’s divaricating plants. These shrubs are known for their dense interlacing branches, small leaves, and wide-angled growth pattern. From a distance, they can look tangled, dry, or even a little awkward. They do not announce themselves with lush petals or easy symmetry.

But that awkwardness is not failure. Divaricating plants are widely understood as shaped by intensity: by browsing pressures, by exposure, and by climatic extremes including wind and cold. They are some of the only plants that grow where I live, in Ōwhiro Bay, Wellington, where the northerly wind is consistent and so relentless.

New Zealand has an unusually high proportion of woody species with this growth form, and the form itself has long fascinated botanists because it appears so strange until one begins to understand its function. What looks messy from outside is often an extraordinarily effective architecture of protection.

That feels especially relevant to my life in Wellington, and even more so on the south coast. In places such as Ōwhiro Bay, wind is not incidental weather but a structuring condition of life. Some plants simply will not grow there, no matter how much one wishes otherwise. The point is not to shame them for failing. It is to notice which plants have become possible through exposure rather than despite it.

This is why mingimingi feels helpful as a metaphor for bringing up kids in intense times. It shifts the question from how to produce perfect conditions to how to cultivate habitat. Habitat is not the same as optimisation. It does not assume control over every variable. It asks instead what kinds of structure, shelter, density, and relational support allow a living thing to move, rest, and keep going under pressure.

That distinction matters for parenting neurodivergent children. Surely ‘orchid’ children do not benefit from a greenhouse (sheltered) life; they need environments that are legible enough to navigate, flexible enough to absorb force, and rich enough to shelter difference.

The goal may be to help form a dense and living structure within which sensitivity, impulsiveness, noise, or tangentiality can become survivable and even generative.

Mingimingi helps because it does not romanticise fragility. It does not deny intensity either. Its form is not a sign that conditions were ideal. It is the record of difficult conditions being met through adaptation. Can this offer a different approach for parenting? Less perfectionist, less haunted by failure (maybe raising orchids is too hard in some situations and that’s ok), and more attentive to the ways kids may already be shaping themselves intelligently in response to worlds that are too much.

There is also an aesthetic argument here. Divaricating shrubs are often overlooked because they do not fit conventional expectations of plant beauty. They can seem scrubby, tangled, even unbecoming. I’ve heard them described as “bird’s nest looking plants”. But seen closely, their branching patterns are intricate and forceful, and their movement in the wind can be graceful.

This feels close to neurodivergent beauty. Not the beauty of easy compliance or polished performance, but the beauty of oblique angles, unexpected rhythms, intense focus, sudden motion, big emotions, and forms of perception that do not arrive gift-wrapped for normative approval. A child can be loud, brash, highly sensitive, and hard to settle, and still be beautiful in ways that conventional metaphors do not know how to hold.

The orchid metaphor often keeps one eye on normativity: the bloom remains the standard. Mingimingi suggests something else. Beauty may lie in shelter-making, in density, in flexibility, in the capacity to move and spring back. It may lie in growing a form that others misrecognise because they have not learned how to look.

One of the loveliest aspects of divaricating plants is that their dense branching creates habitat for other forms of life. Shrubs of this kind can provide shelter for mokomoko, including native lizards, whose survival often depends on dense cover and complex vegetation structure. The tangle protects. What seems unruly and ugly from the outside can hold warmth and refuge within.

That image opens something important for parenting. A good upbringing may not be about producing a polished child for public display. It may be about building the sort of environment in which a child has somewhere to go when the wind is too much. Dense branches, familiar paths, protected interiors, small openings for basking, quick exits when needed: these are habitat features, but they are also parenting practices.

Under this metaphor, raising a child is less like curating a specimen and more like tending an ecosystem. The task is not to eliminate all stress (how could you?) but to create pockets of safety and repeatability, so that a child can keep becoming themselves and feel free to grow in wonderfully wacky directions (like mingimingi).

Together, all of these threads may be shifting my thinking. Rather than asking how to make neurodivergent children fit inherited ideals of flourishing, it becomes possible to ask what local forms of life already teach about growing under pressure.

None of this means abandoning care, structure, or intervention. It means shifting the image of what care is for. Some children are not orchids waiting for someone to master the greenhouse. Some are mingimingi: shaped by wind, dense with life, and capable of making shelter in conditions that would flatten more delicate forms.

In that sense, mingimingi may be less a metaphor for the child alone than for the whole relation between child, parent, and place. It names a way of growing up together in exposed times. It honours intense conditions, strange beauty, and the work of making habitat where one is, rather than longing for conditions that do not exist here.

Or maybe I’m just obsessed with mingimingi.

Acknowledgements: shout out to my good friend Tom Rowley, who first pulled me into gardening and helped me see the links between parenting and plants. I never would have discovered mingimingi if it wasn’t for him.