1 Introduction
The Botanical Imagination
Imagination attempts to have a future.
âGaston 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 obscureâand more emotionally resonant and ethically valuedâlives 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 âwe should define the animal by sensibility and awakened consciousness, the vegetable by consciousness asleep and by insensibilityâ (Bergson 1998, 112). From his standpoint, the photosynthetic evolution of the plantâits uncanny ability to synthesize nutrients from water and carbon dioxideââenables it to dispense with movement and so with feelingâ (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 plantsâalbeit as a latent potentialâhe propounded a cerebrocentric (brain-centered) and, more precisely, neurocentric (nervous system-focused) model of intelligence that brought âtwo tendenciesâ into binary opposition (Bergson 1998, 113). These tendencies comprised, on one end of the spectrum, the âfixity and insensibilityâ of flora and, on the other, the âmobility and consciousnessâ 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 âmore and more distinct, more and more ampleâ (1998, 112). Conversely, one doubts âwhether nervous elements, however rudimentary, will ever be found in the plantâ (1998, 112). Yet, how would Bergsonâand his intellectual antecedentsâhave 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 soundâmore exactly, Mach 0.7 or 537 miles per hourâthe 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 anemophilousâor wind-pollinatedâspecies 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 anthesisâthe full process of flowering from style extension to pollen grain releaseâexceeds 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 âall of the time, often too slowly to notice. Rapid movements, though rarer, are used by many plants in essential functionsâ (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 filamentsâthe stalk of the stamenââinstantly sprung from the petal with considerable force, striking its anthers against the stigmaâ (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 âvery elastic [and] fly up, and throw their pollen about with great forceâ (1788, 162). Additionally, the pericarp, or germen, of yellow lucerne (Medicago falcata), âobtains its liberty by a sudden spring, in consequence of which the pollen is plentifully scattered about the stigmaâ (Smith 1788, 162). To be sure, the unsuspecting plants interrogated meticulously by the botanist exhibited a penchant for âexplosive fracture,â one of three categories of vegetal movementâalong with swelling and shrinking, and snap-bucklingâoutlined 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 evidentâindeed palpableâin 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:
[âŠ] 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 âdiverse kinds of sensitiveness,â 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 âroot-brainâ hypothesis for the final lines of The Power of Movement in Plants. The proposal that plant mentation has an anatomical correlate instigatedâand still instigates todayâa 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 (BaluĆĄka 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 âthe phenomenon of movement in plants under the action of external stimuli presents innumerable difficulties and complicationsâ (1). For that reason, Bose (1919, 547â48) 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 movementsâsuch as mulberry bio-ballisticsâshould 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 byâthough conversant withâAristotelian, 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 neurobiologistsâby attending seriously to vegetal cognitionâreconfigure 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; GarzĂłn 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 âdownright erroneousâ ascription of utter passivity to plants (Marder 2012, 2). In doing so, it provokes a paradigm shift from reductionist-mechanistic methodologies and principles toward âholistic, systems-based analysis of integrated and communicativeâ biological processes (BaluĆĄka and Mancuso 2007, 205).
From a holistic standpoint, plants are âmuch more complex than the sum of their constituentsâ and resist steadfastly the techno-industrial figurations that constructâand deconstructâthem as machines, motors, engines, clocks, instruments, and so on (BaluĆĄka and Mancuso 2007, 206). Rather than an automaton reacting to external stimuli in a generally predetermined fashion, the âintelligent plantâ integrates aspects of communication, sensing, and emergence into its ontological bearing (Pollan 2013). But what are the implications of vegetal neglectâof 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 âcritical plant studiesââthe 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 foregroundingânotably in terms of âplant blindnessâ (Nyberg and Sanders 2014; Wandersee and Schussler 1999; discussed later in this section), global botanical loss, and genetically manipulated speciesâthe 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 âThe Importance of Plantsâ (1944) with the plain admission that ânothing 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 [âŠ] plants are the basis upon which all other life dependsâ (440).
Robbinsâ 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 âable chemists [âŠ] there is no substitute for themâ (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 lifeâor suffer the physical and existential consequences of complacency. In his view, the plant affords âan antidote for the artificiality and tension of city lifeâ and fulfills a âdeep-seated desire in all of usâ for discourse with the other-than-human (Robbins 1944, 442). More specifically, gardening and other practices of cultivation facilitate healthful âtraffic with the soil and the green things that grow from itâ while engendering the virtues of âpatience and philosophyâ (Robbins 1944, 442). On this note, in Chapter 5, the theme of vegetal patienceâthe forbearance of plants in relation to their ontological and temporal comportmentâis central to Alice Oswaldâs poetics of weeds and wildflowers. The idea, moreover, that vegetal life âpacifies and heals the body and the mindâ (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 studiesâone of the fields in which I position my green-streaked analysis of contemporary poetryâattempts 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 âamong humans to neither notice nor value plants in the environmentâ (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...