The Plant Doctor Who Needed Someone to Name the Voice

In Diamond, Missouri, around 1874, a frail orphan boy named George Washington Carver wandered the woods behind the Carver farm, whispering to sickly plants. Neighbors brought him their wilting roses and ailing fruit trees, calling him "the plant doctor," though he was barely ten years old. Something kept pulling him toward the soil, the roots, the hidden architecture of growing things — a persistent nudge he could not explain.…