Martha Stewart Shares the Tree She Most Identifies With

Every week on Entrepreneur’s podcast How Success Happens, I get to talk to awesome people who do awesome things and ask, “How the hell did you do that?” This week, we have a snack-sized edition of the show featuring a person who transcends simply being awesome and is a true icon of American business and culture: Martha Stewart.

A few weeks ago, I got to meet the diva of domesticity herself at an awesome event at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. If you’ve never been to the Botanical Gardens, it’s 250 acres of every tree, plant and flower you can imagine, including Martha Roses, a hybrid Tea Rose named after, of course, Martha Stewart. The New York Botanical Gardens is beautiful. It’s amazing. It’s all very un-“The Bronx”-like.

So at the event, we ate and drank while flipping through the pages of Martha Stewart’s Gardening Handbook, the latest edition to her crazy big bibliography of the over 100 books she’s written at this point.

Related: Martha Stewart: Snoop Dogg Taught Me How to Negotiate Better

Now, when I said that I met Martha, I kind of exaggerated a little bit. I was stuffing my face with these insanely delicious ricotta flatbread things as she walked by in farmer’s overalls. I said, “Hey, Martha!” while trying to swallow. She turned her head to me and nodded. And then…well, that was it. But that counts as meeting her, right? To be fair, she was in a rush. She was on her way to the day’s main event, a taping of her iHeartRadio show, The Martha Stewart Podcast, where all of us gathered here would sit in on and listen.

For this episode, Martha, who is the Chief Gardening Officer of Miracle Grow, decided to interview a celebrity who admittedly knew nothing about gardening to give her a crash course in getting down and dirty. That celebrity was actress and activist Jameela Jamil, who you probably know from her role as Tahani on The Good Place.

Martha and Jameela’s conversation was ridiculously funny and also revealing — Martha doesn’t beat around the bush when she’s got something on her mind. She was dishing out one-liners, zingers, and some mild insults here and there. It was really amazing to watch someone in action who has walked through the fire in life and clearly doesn’t give a flying fig pudding anymore.

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Martha spoke at length about the physical and meditative benefits she gets from gardening, while giving the caretaker of her property, who was sitting in the audience, a few shovefuls of crap for the state of the roses at her home. “I garden a lot,” she told Jameela. “I was pruning roses the other day, I was out there for four hours. Every single muscle in my body ached. And all of my arms were bleeding and my legs were bleeding.”

“Sounds amazing,” deadpanned Jameela.

Martha went on to explain that she has planted about 16,000 trees on her property and surprised everyone when she explained, “I identify with trees. And I have my favorite tree and one I identify most with, and we put it on my org chart when we first established my company. I am the beach tree, the mother of all trees.”

The conversation bobbed and weaved, giving all kinds of insights into the way Martha’s mind works, and putting on display her ability to again and again walk into any space — whether it is catering, writing, or TV hosting — and dominate. And Jameela, who herself is also unafraid to take big swings through creative endeavors and activism on behalf of women, broke down why everyone in that audience was hanging on Martha’s every word: “It all comes down to audacity. I carry the audacity of a straight white man within me, and I go for things that I’m unprepared for, underqualified for. And I think, why not me? It’s not a mentality that I decry in straight white men. I think we need to adopt more of it. And I think one of the reasons that I said yes, in under 15 seconds to getting to meet you today, even though I know nothing about gardening, is because your audacity, amongst the many other things I love about you, is the reason you’re one of my heroes.”

Listen to Martha and Jameela’s entire conversation here and be sure to check out How Success Happens every week for fresh doses of inspiration (but sadly no ricotta flatbread appetizers.)