In many places, farmers work diligently in their fields, their knowledge and their work bringing them close to the land, coaxing bounty from the crops that their brethren have tamed over generations.

Those people are doing it correctly.

In many other places, humans toil not for the benefit of their families or their communities — but under the threat of violence. Their labor is extracted from them, and in turn they extract from the land, caring not what will come of their fields in ten years or a hundred, because there is, for them, only the ever-present threat to harvest more, now or else.

Those people are doing it incorrectly.

But it's not their fault. She didn't hold on to all of who she was, but she held on tight to her ability to understand why humans do things, and she knows that it isn't their fault. They can't farm correctly, held in bondage as they are.

She turns her attention to the problem of how to fix it.

The first thing is ...

She cannot make the ones who are doing it correctly worse off. They have toiled, and struggled, and they deserve to be rewarded.

She casts her power over the planet, like a gentle shower of her rain. Her power is soft, and green. It is slow, and patient — and, like the roots it nurtures, in time it can crack mountains.

Her power soaks into the fields, and she helps. Helps the farmers who love the land, giving them increased yields, healthier crops, and a thousand other slight tweaks to make things run smoothly.

The second thing is ...

She designs a flower. It is a kind of ivy, specially adapted to grow well on buildings. It is dark grey, and grows in curves and twists that look, from a distance, like chains.

It is a beautiful flower, in the way that wolf is beautiful, or a knife. It has deep-penetrating roots, that will drill deep into foundations. It has small white flowers, like stars, that are well adjusted to several different kinds of bird beak. And it has a delicate and complicated internal metabolism that will be easy for her power to bolster ... or to disrupt.

She plants it around the foundations of the houses of the people who threaten the farmers into incorrectness. It takes time, to spread it to all the needed places, and to ensure that it will not grow in places she doesn't intend. But everything worth doing takes time — and nobody will notice for a season, while it grows.

When it does? She knows the humans will get the message.

While her message is growing, she turns her attention to other designs. There are places that used to be green, long ago; she has seen it.

The humans turned it to sand.

But, where another nature god might blame them, she can't. The very first farmers, taking a risk on a new way of life — they needed to send their goats to feed. And it time, they learned how to do it without causing the long, slow desertification of fields that once grew green and full.

But what was done can be undone. It will take time, but she will see the places green again.

The first thing to do is to permit soil retention. Anything that tries to grow there now is liable to be buried under shifting sands. She needs something that is hardy — hard to bury, hard to scour, and needing hardly any nutrients, save those it can gather from the sand and from the wind.

It is a more difficult design challenge than her message, but she is Mila of the fields and grain. She designs a ground-cover plant: more root than anything else, with tiny, waxy leaves. It needs to feed on the sands as much as possible, and while there are existing plants that do nearly as well ... with so much sand to work with, she can perhaps do something better.

The additives she needs are not as abundant. And chemistry is unclear to her — she knows the ways of growing things, the chemical faculties that evolution has granted them ... but not how to adapt them. But she does know the things that humans know, so she relies on a touch of divine power, to paper over the cracks in her design.

They grow glass flowers.

Tiny, delicate things that focus sunlight just right to let the plant get away with less leaf area, reducing water losses from evaporation. Sharp, spiky things that will teach the local animals not to eat them when there are other options available. Beautiful things, that will let the humans know the desert is being reclaimed.

These flowers, too, will take time to grow. It will be many decades or centuries before they make a noticeable impact on the desert, but in time they will carpet it in vines and flowers. She seeds them around those hidden oases that remain.

Ground cover is a good start, but there is more needed.

The other thing that will help is rainfall. Right now, rain falls there only once or twice a year, if that. And when it falls, it falls in great torrential rains that wash away plants and animals alike in a great flood that violently reshapes the land itself.

More rainfall — and more consistent rainfall ­— will do wonders. Even just increased humidity will slow evaporation, and help.

So she designs a plant that will help seed the clouds: an adapted marsh reed, taken from salty river deltas and changed to thrive in the sea. It is like sea grass, anchoring to the sea floor and growing upward. But strategically placed gas bladders let it grow taller and further, up into the air. It will spread out in great forests, when fully grown, and draw sea water up into the air.

She seeds it upwind of the desert. In time, the winds will gentle themselves with the kiss of water unleashed.

She is a god, but these things take time, and by the time she has finished her planting and looked again at the world, much has changed.

She casts her gaze back over the past seasons, and plans her next move.