Plant

John Charles Ryan

Related terms: activism, agency, Anthropocene, biocentrism, botany, conservation, ecocentrism, ecocriticism, ethics, fungi, garden, multispecies, rewilding, rhizome, sentience, subjectivity, zoocentrism

Most biology textbooks define a plant as a eukaryote, an organism distinguished by membranes surrounding the nuclei of its cells. Usually multicellular, except for some algae, plants produce energy from sunlight through photosynthesis involving the green pigment chlorophyll. Kingdom Plantae consists primarily of bryophytes (liverworts, hornworts, and mosses), spore-bearing vascular species (ferns, horsetails, and club mosses), and seed-bearing vascular species (gymnosperms and angiosperms).

But what is a plant? Is “plant” a biological category, a cultural construction, or both? How do plants’ lives compare to our own? Can a plant suffer? Do plants have agency and subjectivity? What does thinking about vegetal life involve? Is it possible to communicate and collaborate meaningfully with the botanical world? What perspectives do the arts, humanities, and social sciences bring to studying flora? These are some of the key questions explored by environmental humanists interested in plants and human-flora relations.

Humankind is deeply interconnected with the botanical realm. As sources of nourishment, healing, beauty, pleasure, and spiritual connection, plants are vital to societies globally. While making our earthly existence possible, floristic life also inspires our identities and expresses our cultural heritage. The very act of breathing reminds us of our indissoluble symbiotic union with plants. Observe your immediate environment, and you will invariably notice that plants and their materials are omnipresent.  

Populating nearly every corner of the world, except Antarctica, plants represent 80–90 percent of the Earth’s biomass. There are close to 400,000 vascular species on our planet. Representing most land-based flora, vascular plants are defined as those with specialized tissues for transporting water, minerals, and photosynthetic products.

Despite humanity’s obvious dependence on botanical nature, the future of plant diversity is uncertain. Habitat degradation, land use changes, and climatic instability, among other factors, will continue to imperil botanical communities including forests, wetlands, grasslands, and aquatic ecosystems. In 2019, for instance, biologists identified 1,942 new plant species globally yet, in the same year, they declared that 40 per cent of all known plants faced extinction (Cheek et al. 2020).

In Japan, the recent identification of a new fairy lantern highlights some of these complexities. Distinguished by their orange bell-shaped flowers, fairy lanterns lack chlorophyll and feed on fungi. Many lead subterranean lives until their blossoms, resembling blown glass, rise briefly above the leaf litter. Fairy lanterns are especially elusive and endangered. Of the 108 species documented by scientists, 55 are restricted to the sites where they were first located and, astonishingly, 38 species represent an individual specimen. The extreme rarity of these plants renders them highly vulnerable to disturbance (Suetsugu et al. 2024).   

Scientific and common names disclose much about human perceptions of plants. In the above example from Japan, the genus, Relictithismia, combines the Latin term relictus for “left behind” with Thismia, the general taxonomic name for fairy lanterns. The species, kimotsukiensis, conveys the ecological and cultural embeddedness of the fairy lantern in the Kimotsuki Mountains. What’s more, the Japanese name, mujina-no-shokudai, evokes the plant’s underground mode of existence through the image of a burrowing badger.

Demonstrated by the case of Relictithismia kimotsukiensis, language encodes a constellation of conceptions about vegetal nature. In the mid-1500s, speakers of Modern English began to use plant to refer broadly to vegetation as a form of life differing radically from animals. As a noun, the word plant originates in the Latin planta for “sprout,” “cutting,” or “sole of the foot.” As a verb, plant derives from plantare, “to drive in with the feet,” linguistically signifying the co-implication of human and vegetal bodies.

Botanical metaphors weave throughout the English language. Some of them have positive inflexions. To branch out is to shift one’s activities to a new and promising focus. To blossom is to actualize one’s potential. Yet others are pejorative. To remain rooted to the ground is to be unable to move because of shock. In a vegetative state, one is awake but without cognitive function. To bypass the negative connotations of the term vegetable, many researchers in the eco-humanities are reviving the archaic descriptor vegetal, denoting a capacity for vigorous growth.

These etymologies collectively reveal how the plant in Western intellectual history has been characterised largely as the binary opposite of the human and the animal. The Neoplatonic principle of the great chain of being relegates plants to an inferior position below animals yet above minerals. According to this hierarchical logic, plants are alive yet lack movement and perception. In this context, Aristotle regarded the vegetative soul as the primitive basis for the higher-order sensitive soul of animals and the intellective soul of humans. The Greek philosopher classified plants as all living things, including algae and fungi, that are not animals.

The turn towards plants in the environmental humanities aims to overcome deep-seated preconceptions of botanical life as insentient, immobile, and inconsequential non-animals. The burgeoning field of the plant humanities critiques dominant cultural narratives of flora as passive and promotes awareness of the significance of vegetal diversity. The field draws widely from the related areas of critical plant studies (philosophy), ethnobotany (anthropology), human-plant studies (cultural studies), phytocriticism (literary studies), plant geography, and neuro botany (plant science).  

Plant humanists address a serious societal challenge described as plant blindness (Balding and Williams 2016) or, alternately, plant awareness disparity (Parsley et al. 2022). Both terms refer to the perceptual tendency to neglect the flora of one’s surroundings and to undervalue the role of plants in everyday life. Connected to these ideas is plant kinship blindness, a scientific notion stressing that flora and fauna share a common evolutionary heritage beginning 3.9 billion years ago (Bouteau et al. 2021). The modern refusal to acknowledge genetic kinship between animals and plants continues because of the overriding view of the latter as inferior.  

In dialogue with recent empirical findings, plant humanists reevaluate the presumption that botanical life lacks sentient behaviour. The plant humanities consider how emerging interdisciplinary understandings of plants can transform cultural, social, and literary engagements with them. Known by an array of names such as plant neurobiology, the science of neurobotany examines cognitive processes in flora. This growing area of research points to the presence of altruism, communication, memory, sensing, and other percipient traits in the botanical domain.

Although lacking a brain and nerves, plants exhibit cognitive characteristics reflecting their acute sensitivities. For instance, species such as rockcress display altruistic behaviour, including care for kin and non-kin, which enhances the collective fitness of an ecosystem through cooperation. Japanese camellia shrubs emit chemical cues warning nearby plants about herbivores and pathogens. Studies also show that pea seedlings learn by association while citrus trees inherit memories of drought, predation, and other stressors from previous generations.

Memory in plants is a complex faculty that enhances ecological adaptation. Sentinel plants communicate experiences of threats, helping their neighbours minimise risk. Old trees transmit knowledge of adverse conditions to younger generations to bolster the resilience of kin. The exchange of experience between generations prevents seeds from germinating at the same time. By memorising fluctuations in light, temperature, and pressure, silver birches can anticipate and respond to changes in their habitats. Plants are also known to repress memories that they decide could harm future generations (Galviz 2020). 

In recent years, a closely related phenomenon captivating the public imagining of vegetal life is the wood wide web. Coined in 1997 by the editors of Nature to describe the research of forest ecologist Suzanne W. Simard and colleagues, this term refers to the underground communication networks mediated by symbiotic associations between plant roots and fungi called mycorrhizae (Simard et al. 1997). The root-soil interface, or rhizosphere, is an especially active site of information exchange between plants, animals, insects, fungi, humans, and other life forms. At the same time, symbiotic alliances with mycorrhizae provide plants with the energy required to undertake learning, memory, and other processes.  

Plants not only have the ability to communicate and respond but also to feel and remember. By foregrounding their sentient qualities, neurobotany counters the prevailing view of plants as lacking self-directedness. The term plant sentience signifies the depth of awareness possessed by a tree, shrub, bush, fern, or herb as an individual subject within an ecological collective. The idea of sentience suggests the ability to experience, express, react, remember, and conduct behaviours associated with intelligence. Sentient plants are endowed with sense: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and orienting their bodies in time and space.  

Sentience, in turn, implies the agency of botanical nature. Agency is a highly generative concept in the plant humanities that signals the capacity of plants to interact with their environments and shape the lives of other creatures. Agency disrupts the normative view of plants as passive automatons unconsciously responding to the stimuli directed at them by mobile beings. As agents, plants make decisions, communicate, perceive, and sense the world around them. Informed by scientific findings, the agency has great potential to transform approaches to botanical life in art, criticism, performance, philosophy, writing, and other humanistic domains. 

To study plants from an interdisciplinary standpoint informed by agency, eco-humanists apply a mixed range of archival, historical, textual, digital, ethnographic, multispecies, arts-based, and collaborative approaches. For instance, ethnographic research in the plant humanities involves interviewing and observing human communities in the traditional sense yet also innovates methods of directly including plants as active participants. Similarly, collaborative, multispecies, and arts-based approaches engage plants as dynamic agents capable of contributing to the genesis of creative works. The emphasis on herbaria in plant humanities scholarship mirrors the fact that many recent additions to the world’s known flora come from botanical gardens and research centres rather than remote locations.   

Through these and other approaches, interdisciplinary plant researchers explore the connections between botanical nature and narratives. Plants often act as narrative agents driving plots, creating tension, providing context, expressing meaning, and conveying knowledge. In the oral and written narratives of many cultures, plants serve as central characters. In some stories, plants are narrators themselves who speak from their vantage points, engage with other characters, and project distinctive identities. Yet, as the example of a tree ring reveals to us, plants are inherently narrative. Their material presence in the world tells wordless stories of history, culture, and ecology.

The plant humanities promotes novel perceptions of vegetal life through narratives recognising plants’ myriad capacities. As an area of specialisation within the plant humanities, botanical literary studies supply a scholarly framework for new stories to take shape. Depictions of botanical nature and human-flora interactions are evident across all literary genres – from poetry and short fiction to novels and scripts. As a specific application of ecocriticism, phytocriticism involves the analysis of literary texts through a plant-focused lens. Phytocritics interrogate scientific representations, scrutinise postcolonial contexts, and articulate how plants contribute to literary production and cultural expression.

Phytocriticism can be understood as a phytocentric critical practice. By shifting focus to vegetal life, the ethical framework of phytocentrism accords with recent directions in botanical science revealing plants’ sentient attributes. Rather than unseating anthropocentrism (human-centeredness) and zoocentrism (animal-centeredness), however, phytocentrism dispenses with centrism entirely. In the absence of the central nervous system of animals, cognitive processes in plants are inherently decentralised. As such, phytocentrism presents an alternative to the coarse-grained ethics of biocentrism (privileging all living things) and ecocentrism (placing value on ecosystems and the ecosphere).  

An illustration of the decentralised nature of plants is the rhizome. Plant biologists understand rhizomes as thick horizontal underground stems producing buds, shoots, and roots. Critical theorists have adopted the figure of the rhizome to refer to networks linking any node to another in a non-linear fashion resulting in heterogeneous forms. The rhizome stands for multiplicity because, after fraying or rupturing, it resumes growing vigorously. In contrast to the deeply interconnected rhizome, the metaphor of arborescence uses the quintessentially branched structure of the tree to call attention to hierarchical formations with limited resilience (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).

The example of the rhizome underscores the connection between plants and ethics, an area of philosophy appraising the moral status of plants and human obligations to protect them. Plant ethicists consider the dignity, flourishing, and rights of plants as sentient subjects. The ethical concerns investigated by researchers include the logging of old-growth forests, the conservation of rare species, the impact of tourism on floristic diversity, and the prevalence of genetic engineering in agriculture. Another concern falling within the scope of plant ethics is the freedom of Indigenous societies to protect their cultural knowledge of plants from corporate appropriation.   

Indigenous people’s relationships to flora are pivotal to the continued fluorescence of interdisciplinary plant studies. In contrast to ethnobotanical research prioritising social scientific methods, the plant humanities foregrounds a broad spectrum of visual, verbal, and textual narratives relating Indigenous cultures to certain species. As a case in point, the wild yam (Dioscorea transversa) is vital to Indigenous Australians. The harvesting of yams is a traditional phytocentric economy based on experiential knowledge of the flowering, fruiting, and seeding of the species over the seasons. For Aboriginal people, the yam is a powerful being. Narratives are sung and artworks are dedicated to the plant’s spirit to ensure the flourishing of the community (Ryan 2020).  

Indigenous botanical traditions affirm the importance of regarding plants as teachers and allies. The wisdom of botanical life is crucial to the emergence of phytocentric societies focused on cultivating respect for the vegetal world and dispelling plant awareness disparity. Design practices based on plants are termed phytomimetics, deriving from phyto for “plant” and mimesis for “imitation.” The plant-oriented design draws inspiration from botanical nature in selecting concepts, materials, and arrangements. The aim is to devise sustainable solutions to architecture, urban planning, and product design. An instance of phytomimetics is the modelling of efficient architectural designs on the bristle-lined trap that the carnivorous waterwheel plant (Aldrovanda vesiculosa) has evolved to catch prey (Srisuwan 2020).    

On an increasingly urbanised planet, vegetal life can also inspire regreening initiatives in cities. Much like plant, the word garden functions as both a noun and a verb but reflects an etymological basis in guard. To garden is to guard or to cultivate—“to keep, maintain, preserve, and protect.” The biosphere is a garden. Ecosystems are gardens. Cities can be gardens too. Plants garden—they are guardians and gardeners of ecological wisdom in wild and urban places alike. Cultivated by both humans and plants in conjunction with other organisms, the cities of the future have the potential to become like forests, wetlands, deserts, arctic zones, deep-sea habitats, and other gardens of the Earth. The sentience of plants enables us to appreciate gardens as cooperative, multispecies systems in Atlanta, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Montreal, New York, Paris, Taipei, Tokyo, and elsewhere.    

Research in the plant humanities can lead to enduring societal impacts as communities become committed to ensuring the flourishing of plants and the rewilding of damaged areas. For guidance, ecohumanists can look towards the work of inspired phytophiles or “lovers of plants” – from Henry David Thoreau and Robin Kimmerer in the United States to Jagadish Chandra Bose and Jadav “Molai” Payeng in India. Known widely as the Forest Man of India, Payeng is a farmer and environmental conservationist from Majuli, a river island in Assam, India. Over decades, he has cultivated various tree species on a sandbar of the Brahmaputra River, transforming a heavily degraded environment into a flourishing ecological reserve. Named “Molai” in honour of his work, the restored ecosystem of over 1,300 acres provides habitat for tigers, deer, monkeys, elephants, birds, and other species. Payeng’s story exemplifies the transformative power of new narratives of plants and human-flora relations in an era of rampant biodiversity loss (Singh 2023). 

References

Balding, Mung, and Kathryn J.H. Williams. 2016. “Plant Blindness and the Implications for Plant Conservation.” Conservation Biology 30 (6): 1192–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12738.

Bouteau, François, Etienne Grésillon, Denis Chartieret al. 2021. “Our Sisters the Plants? Notes from Phylogenetics and Botany on Plant Kinship Blindness,” Plant Signaling & Behavior 16 (12): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2021.2004769.

Cheek, Martin, Eimear Nic Lughadha, Paul Kirk, et al. 2020. “New Scientific Discoveries: Plants and Fungi.” Plants, People, Planet 2 (5): 371–88. https://doi: 10.1002/ppp3.10148.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Galviz, Yutcelia C. F., Rafael V. Ribeiro, and Gustavo M. Souza. 2020. “Yes, Plants Do Have Memory,” Theoretical and Experimental Plant Physiology 32 (3): 195–202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40626-020-00181-y.

Parsley, Kathryn M., Bernie J. Daigle, Jaime L. Sabel, and Ross Nehm. 2022. “Initial Development and Validation of the Plant Awareness Disparity Index.” CBE Life Sciences Education 21 (4): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-12-0275.

Ryan, John C. 2020. “Wild Yam Dreaming: The Phytopoetics of Emily Kame Kngwarreye,” Plumwood Mountain Journal 7 (1). https://plumwoodmountain.com/essays-interviews/wild-yam-dreaming-the-phytopoetics-of-emily-kame-kngwarreye/.

Simard, Suzanne W., David A. Perry, Melanie D. Jones, David D. Myrold, Daniel M. Durall, and Randy Molinak. 1997. “Net Transfer of Carbon Between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the Field,” Nature 388 (6642): 579–82.

Singh, Rina. 2023. The Forest Keeper: The True Story of Jadav Payeng. Zurich: NorthSouth Books.

Srisuwan, Touchaphong. 2020. “Phyto-Inspired Design: Innovative Solutions for Architecture.” Built 16: 7–22.

Suetsugu, Kenji, Yasunori Nakamura, Takafumi Nakano, and Shuichiro Tagane. 2024. “Relictithismia kimotsukiensis, A New Genus and Species of Thismiaceae from Southern Japan with Discussions on its Phylogenetic Relationship.” Journal of Plant Research 137 (3): 411–22. https://doi: 10.1007/s10265-024-01532-5.