Plants in Contemporary Poetry

Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination

John Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317287551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

Positioned within current ecocritical scholarship, this volume is the first book-length study of the representations of plants in contemporary American, English, and Australian poetry. Through readings of botanically-minded writers including Les Murray, Louise Glück, and Alice Oswald, it addresses the relationship between language and the subjectivity, agency, sentience, consciousness, and intelligence of vegetal life. Scientific, philosophical, and literary frameworks enable the author to develop an interdisciplinary approach to examining the role of plants in poetry. Drawing from recent plant science and contributing to the exciting new field of critical plant studies, the author develops a methodology he calls "botanical criticism" that aims to redress the lack of emphasis on plant life in studies of poetry. As a subset of ecocriticism, botanical criticism investigates how poets engage with plants literally and figuratively, materially and symbolically, in their works. Key themes covered in this volume include plants as invasives and weeds in human settings; as sources of physical and spiritual nourishment; as signifiers of region, home, and identity; as objects of aesthetics and objectivism; and, crucially, as beings with their own perspectives, voices, and modes of dialogue. Ryan demonstrates that poetic imagination is as essential as scientific rationality to elucidating and appreciating the mysteries of plant-being. This book will appeal to a multidisciplinary readership in the fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetry, environmental humanities, and ecocultural studies, and will be of interest to researchers in the emerging area of critical plant studies.

1 Introduction

The Botanical Imagination

Imagination attempts to have a future.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1971, 8)

Of the prevailing ideas about plants that inhabit the imagination, ballistics, I suggest, would not be at the top of the leaderboard. We tend to associate flora with aesthetics (beautiful flowers, delectable fruits, sublime forests) and poetics (poetry and poetic thoughts about flowers, fruits, and forests) rather than biomechanics, namely the rapid and occasionally targeted expulsion of projectiles. After all, for the most part, we think botanical life is sessile (unmoving), silent (lacking address), passive (acted upon by mobile life-forms), and, of course, pleasing (agreeable to the senses). Granted there are notable exceptions to the master narrative of the vegetal world as, indeed, vegetative in the pejorative sense of the descriptor as dull and unthinking. For instance, carnivorous orchids ensnare and consume insects, touch-me-nots recoil when contacted, and skunk cabbage emits a fetor that seduces pollinators but repulses people. On the whole, however, humankind envisages plants as mundane elements of the scenery (Pollan 2015); as the stuff we eat, process, and otherwise appropriate (Allen and Hatfield 2004); and as accoutrements to the less obscure—and more emotionally resonant and ethically valued—lives of animals and other non-plants (Taylor and Twine 2014). As a case in point from the history of philosophy, in Creative Evolution (1998, published originally in 1907), Henri Bergson reinscribed the age-old dualism demarcating between the zoological realm and its botanical counterpart. The thinker contended that “we should define the animal by sensibility and awakened consciousness, the vegetable by consciousness asleep and by insensibility” (Bergson 1998, 112). From his standpoint, the photosynthetic evolution of the plant—its uncanny ability to synthesize nutrients from water and carbon dioxide—“enables it to dispense with movement and so with feeling” (1998, 112).

Like many commentators both before and since him, Bergson framed animality in terms of the presumed deficiencies of vegetality. Despite his intimation that consciousness inheres within plants—albeit as a latent potential—he propounded a cerebrocentric (brain-centered) and, more precisely, neurocentric (nervous system-focused) model of intelligence that brought “two tendencies” into binary opposition (Bergson 1998, 113). These tendencies comprised, on one end of the spectrum, the “fixity and insensibility” of flora and, on the other, the “mobility and consciousness” of animals (1998, 113). To be sure, Creative Evolution at times is wholly fixated on fixity and engrossed with insensibility. Bergson negativized these so-called tendencies as the primary characteristics of botanical life. The mobility of animals renders their consciousness “more and more distinct, more and more ample” (1998, 112). Conversely, one doubts “whether nervous elements, however rudimentary, will ever be found in the plant” (1998, 112). Yet, how would Bergson—and his intellectual antecedents—have responded to the principle of vegetal ballistics in addition to recent findings in the field of plant neurobiology? Would they have been able to figure these illuminations of vegetal ontology into a negative calculus of flora? The ideas of cognition and ballistics in plants, indeed, trouble the characterization of photosynthetic life as dull, insensate, and spatially fixed. Of course, Bergson was unaware of the projectile mechanisms of plants such as white mulberry (Morus alba), a medium-sized tree native to China and historically central to the production of silk but also cultivated as an ornamental in Europe, including in the formal French gardens he would have encountered. Traveling at a rate in excess of half the speed of sound—more exactly, Mach 0.7 or 537 miles per hour—the pollen expulsion of white mulberry has been described as the fastest recorded biological motion (Taylor et al. 2006).

On close inspection, the mulberry is much more than a dullard, automaton, or passive substratum for the manipulations of birds, silkworms, and other more mobile creatures, including philosophers. Despite attributions of passivity to plants, the tree enacts behaviors of its own, notably those involving rapid ballistic movement wherein a projectile acquires all of its impetus prior to being launched (Vogel 2005, 167). Although anemophilous—or wind-pollinated—species are known to hurl pollen explosively through the air, the mulberry does so at a pace that approaches the hypothetical limit for botanical movement (Taylor et al. 2006, 19). Consequently, mulberry anthesis—the full process of flowering from style extension to pollen grain release—exceeds all known calculations of time motion, initial velocity, and power output in plants and rivals the speeds of the fastest terrestrial animals (Taylor et al. 2006, 23). As applied mathematician Jan Skotheim and evolutionary biologist Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan (2005) clarify, botanical life moves “all of the time, often too slowly to notice. Rapid movements, though rarer, are used by many plants in essential functions” (1308). Generalized as nastic movement, nonmuscular hydraulic propulsion in plants is moderated by internal water conveyance (Skotheim and Mahadevan 2005, 1308). Observations of nastic phenomena, nevertheless, are not confined to the province of contemporary botanical science. In the late eighteenth century, for instance, the English botanist James Edward Smith prodded the bud of a barberry (Berberis communis) specimen with a stick, after which one of the filaments—the stalk of the stamen—“instantly sprung from the petal with considerable force, striking its anthers against the stigma” (1788, 158). In this manner, Smith expedited the copulation of the male (stamen, filament, anther) and female (stigma, style, ovary) members of the barberry flower.

During provocations of other species in Chelsea Physic Garden, Smith further witnessed the rapidity of nastic movement. The stamen of pellitory (Parietaria spp.), are “very elastic [and] fly up, and throw their pollen about with great force” (1788, 162). Additionally, the pericarp, or germen, of yellow lucerne (Medicago falcata), “obtains its liberty by a sudden spring, in consequence of which the pollen is plentifully scattered about the stigma” (Smith 1788, 162). To be sure, the unsuspecting plants interrogated meticulously by the botanist exhibited a penchant for “explosive fracture,” one of three categories of vegetal movement—along with swelling and shrinking, and snap-buckling—outlined by Skotheim and Mahadevan (2005, 1309). Notwithstanding the rationalization of plant motion in mechanical terms as the upshot of internal and external variables, a sense of wonderment is evident—indeed palpable—in scientific accounts of the principle. Of note is The Power of Movement in Plants, originally published in 1880, in which Charles and Francis Darwin employed the term circumnutation to describe the helical patterns of movement in the botanical world:

[…] apparently every growing part of every plant is continually circumnutating, though often on a small scale. Even the stems of seedlings before they have broken through the ground, as well as their buried radicles, circumnutate, as far as the pressure of the surrounding earth permits. In this universally present movement we have the basis or groundwork for the acquirement, according to the requirements of the plant, of the most diversified movements.

(Darwin and Darwin 2016, 2)

At the end of the disquisition, Charles and his son speculated famously that the tip of the radicle (the part of the embryo that becomes the primary root), with its “diverse kinds of sensitiveness,” is analogous to the animal brain and mediates the processing of sensory information within the plant (Darwin and Darwin 2016, 419; also Chapter 6 of this volume).

It is not accidental that the Darwins reserved the contentious “root-brain” hypothesis for the final lines of The Power of Movement in Plants. The proposal that plant mentation has an anatomical correlate instigated—and still instigates today—a radical leveling of botanical and zoological ontologies while retaining the essential difference between the two discrete domains of life. In contrast, the Aristotelian tradition elevated animals to the category of anima sensitiva (the sensitive soul) while confining plants to anima nutritiva (the nutritive soul), or the sphere of growth and reproduction (De Chadarevian 1996, 26; see Chapter 2 of this volume). Although providing the material foundation for higher-order soul-form teleologies, the plant itself remained fettered to the insensate realm. Highly responsive plants such as touch-me-not (Mimosa pudica) were considered anomalies indicating the tactile sensitivities of a few species. The idea of purposive growth movements in response to stimuli, however, threatened to unsettle the paradigm of irritability and the conception of botanical life (De Chadarevian 1996, 26). As a consequence, the renowned botanist Julius von Sachs rebuked the Darwins for careless and amateurish experiments that mistakenly embellished the plant as an agentic life-form (Baluška et al. 2009, 1121). Subsequent plant physiologists, nevertheless, emphasized that vegetal movement requires the kind of self-directedness indicating conscious being-in-the-world. In particular, Jagadis Chandra Bose opened the first volume of his treatise Life Movements in Plants (1995, published originally in 1918) by asserting that “the phenomenon of movement in plants under the action of external stimuli presents innumerable difficulties and complications” (1). For that reason, Bose (1919, 547–48) distinguished internally-induced autonomous movements from tropic responses prompted by unilateral external stimuli. As Dov Koller maintains in his evocatively titled The Restless Plant (2011, 5), nastic movements—such as mulberry bio-ballistics—should be regarded as autonomous because they are modulated by signals produced by the plant.

Vegetal Cognition and the Perils of Plant Neglect

It is indeed an exciting time for (re)considering vegetal being. The burgeoning area of plant neurobiology ever more apprises artistic, cultural, literary, and philosophical approaches to flora (for example, Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira 2017; Irigaray and Marder 2016; Marder 2013, 2014). During the progression of Plants in Contemporary Poetry, I contextualize the botanical imaginings of eight poets from Australia, England, and the United States in relation to ideas emerging from this wide-ranging and dynamic field. My hope is that the present study will help to disclose the power of verse to anticipate and parallel scientific thought through a freedom of imagination unrestrained by—though conversant with—Aristotelian, Cartesian, Linnaean, and other prevailing discourses of botanical life. Reclaiming the wonderment underlying the experimental efforts of Bose, Darwin, Smith, and their scientific forebears, plant neurobiologists—by attending seriously to vegetal cognition—reconfigure the longstanding conception of plants as anima nutritiva, that is, as the inert substratum for the enactment of the life-worlds of organisms endowed with brains (Barlow 2008; Calvo 2016; Garzón 2007; Trewavas 2014, 2016; Van Loon 2016). Notwithstanding its critics (Alpi et al. 2007; Firn 2004; Struik, Yin, and Meinke 2008), plant neurobiology underscores the “downright erroneous” ascription of utter passivity to plants (Marder 2012, 2). In doing so, it provokes a paradigm shift from reductionist-mechanistic methodologies and principles toward “holistic, systems-based analysis of integrated and communicative” biological processes (Baluška and Mancuso 2007, 205).

From a holistic standpoint, plants are “much more complex than the sum of their constituents” and resist steadfastly the techno-industrial figurations that construct—and deconstruct—them as machines, motors, engines, clocks, instruments, and so on (Baluška and Mancuso 2007, 206). Rather than an automaton reacting to external stimuli in a generally predetermined fashion, the “intelligent plant” integrates aspects of communication, sensing, and emergence into its ontological bearing (Pollan 2013). But what are the implications of vegetal neglect—of conceptually reducing the plant to an insensate mechanical assemblage while discounting its subjectivity as a discerning participant in its world, and in ours? To be certain, the premise of the overlooked, or marginalized, plant is central to “critical plant studies”—the nascent area of inquiry into the vegetal world that incorporates diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological frames, including those of neuro-botany (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira 2017; Hall 2011; Marder 2013; Vieira, Gagliano, and Ryan 2016). Despite its relatively recent foregrounding—notably in terms of “plant blindness” (Nyberg and Sanders 2014; Wandersee and Schussler 1999; discussed later in this section), global botanical loss, and genetically manipulated species—the lamentation of vegetal neglect has cropped up consistently in different forms throughout botanical history. As an example from the post-Second World War era, botanist and former director of the New York Botanical Garden, William Robbins, began an address “The Importance of Plants” (1944) with the plain admission that “nothing I have to say here is new; all of it has been known for many years, some of it for a century or more. Yet I believe that the repetition from time to time of facts of fundamental import has its place […] plants are the basis upon which all other life depends” (440).

Robbins’ elucidation of the biospheric, scientific, economic, recreational, and cultural value of flora is as salient now as it was last century, particularly as the intensification of habitat degradation, invasive taxa, overharvesting, pollution, and climate change continues to fracture botanical communities globally (Dornelas et al. 2014). In a linguistic gesture conveying respect and admiration for flora, the botanist (1944) even personifies plants as “able chemists […] there is no substitute for them” (441). Nonetheless, owing to the human inclination to background plants as landscapes, objects, or materials, one must be reminded regularly of the significance of vegetal life—or suffer the physical and existential consequences of complacency. In his view, the plant affords “an antidote for the artificiality and tension of city life” and fulfills a “deep-seated desire in all of us” for discourse with the other-than-human (Robbins 1944, 442). More specifically, gardening and other practices of cultivation facilitate healthful “traffic with the soil and the green things that grow from it” while engendering the virtues of “patience and philosophy” (Robbins 1944, 442). On this note, in Chapter 5, the theme of vegetal patience—the forbearance of plants in relation to their ontological and temporal comportment—is central to Alice Oswald’s poetics of weeds and wildflowers. The idea, moreover, that vegetal life “pacifies and heals the body and the mind” (Robbins 1944, 442) resonates conspicuously in the work of Elisabeth Bletsoe in Chapter 4 and Joy Harjo in Chapter 9. As enacted by Bletsoe, Oswald, Harjo, and the other contemporary poets of this study, poetry makes available a lyrical means to counterbalance and redress the disregard implied by Robbins and, consequently, to bring emphasis to the multilayered capacities of plants beyond their unidimensional linkage to food, fiber, medicine, and the provision of resources.

In (re)turning human attention to botanical being, critical plant studies—one of the fields in which I position my green-streaked analysis of contemporary poetry—attempts to reverse the tendency denoted as plant blindness. Worried by the low priority given to threatened species and botanical communities within conservation discourse, biologists have put forward the notion of plant blindness to denote the tendency “among humans to neither notice nor value plants in the environment” (Balding and Williams 2016, 1192). As an inclination to overlook flora, to undervalue its global biocultural significance, or to render it appropriable matter in service to human desire, plant blindness highlights the physiological limits of visual processing in humans (Balas and Momsen 2014, 437). While we are able to register animals and other mobile organisms carrying out their l...