Plants in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Melanie Duckworth, Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Melanie Duckworth, Lykke Guanio-Uluru

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000469189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the forests of the tales of the Brothers Grimm to Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree, from the flowers of Cicely May Barker's fairies to the treehouse in Andy Griffith and Terry Denton's popular 13-Storey Treehouse series, trees and other plants have been enduring features of stories for children and young adults. Plants act as gateways to other worlds, as liminal spaces, as markers of permanence and change, and as metonyms of childhood and adolescence. This anthology is the first compilation devoted entirely to analysis of the representation of plants in children's and young adult literatures, reflecting the recent surge of interest in cultural plant studies within the environmental humanities.

Mapping out and presenting an internationally inclusive view of plant representation in texts for children and young adults, the volume includes contributions examining European, American, Australian, and Asian literatures and contributes to the research fields of ecocriticism, critical plant studies, and the study of children's and young adult literatures.

Part I

Botanical Fascinations

DOI: 10.4324/9781032066356-2

1 A Relational Poetics of Plant–Human Interactions

Contrasting the Picturebooks of Cicely Mary Barker and Elsa Beskow¹

Terri Doughty

DOI: 10.4324/9781032066356-3

The United Nations declared 2020 the Year of Plant Health (http://ww.fao.org/plant-health-2020/hom/en/), recognizing the importance globally of the need to protect plant species diversity and habitat. It can be challenging, however, to mobilize humans to promote plant health. This is perhaps connected to “plant blindness”, which Margaretha Häggström (2017) defines in part as “incapacity to see or observe plants in our environment” and “failure to understand plants’ function on earth” (p. 91). I would elaborate that plant blindness also encompasses an inability to see the interconnections between humans and plants. Engendering more respectful, perhaps even cooperative, interactions between humans and plants requires a cognitive shift, for humans to reject species hierarchies and recognize that plants and humans are interconnected in webs of kinship, what Donna Haraway (2015) refers to as “rich multispecies assemblages” (p. 160). This chapter compares the flower fairies of Cicely Mary Barker with Elsa Beskow’s plant–human hybrids to explore how they might be read as contributing to such a cognitive shift by re-visioning how humans live with plants.

As Lydia Kokkola (2017) notes, “children’s literature has an important role to play in developing ecopedagogy” (p. 278). Likewise, Alexandra Lakind and Chessa Adsit-Morris (2018) state, “[w]e need alternative imaginaries” (p. 38) to transform ecological thinking. Both Barker’s and Beskow’s books can be read to generate an affective cognitive shift in children by providing such “alternative imaginaries”, with the fantastic figures of flower fairies and hybrid plant people providing opportunities for empathetic engagement with the more-than-human. Recent research in environmental education has found that children can develop moral and affective understandings of plants (Villanueva, Villaroel, & Antón, 2018; Collado & Sorrel, 2019). Moreover, such understanding can derive from vicarious as well as physical experience of nature (Soga, Gaston, Yamaura, Kurisu, & Hanaki, 2016), which suggests that picturebooks can have a role in shaping children’s awareness of and sense of relationship to plant others.

A relational poetics of plant–human interactions emerges from contrasting the works of Barker and Beskow. Working in the first half of the 20th century, both women created iconic images of flower fairies or plant people, blurring the plant–human boundary. However, Barker’s illustrations, although notable for their botanical accuracy (Laing, 1995, p. 38; Scott, 2007, p. 291), mostly represent the plant fairies as individuals and sometimes pairs, not as part of a broader community of plants and people, though this is occasionally addressed in accompanying verse. Beskow provides similar types of illustrations for Jeanna Oterdahl’s Blommornas bok [The Flowers’ Book], a book of poems about flowers, early in her career, but in some of her own books, such as Blomsterfesten i Täppan [The Flowers’ Festival] and Lasse Liten i Trädgården [Christopher’s Garden],² she not only represents plants living within complex communities, but she shows human children interacting in non-exploitive ways with the flora. Beskow has been acknowledged for creating a Swedish cultural identity rooted in nature (see Halldén, 1989; Westin, 2008; Borg and Ullström, 2017). I argue that she also models a relational poetics of plant–human connections.

Defining a Relational Poetics of Human–Plant Interactions

Environmental philosophers and educators have developed various concepts to describe how to think about human and more-than-human differences and connections. Affrica Taylor (2013) writes about the need to “resituate[d] childhoods within down-to-earth natureculture common worlds” (p. 116). She specifies “thinking through our everyday multispecies interactions and relations … [and] recognis[ing] our interdependencies and agencies” (2017, p. 67), in short decentring the human for interrelations that promote the well-being of all. Likewise, discussing children and urban nature, Karen Malone (2018) uses the trope of entanglement to describe the relationship between child and nature as akin to “the connections with/in the human body itself, between its ‘own’ cells and the trillions of microorganisms … that inhabit and compose it” (p. 87). As humans are already in/of nature, relations between humans and other species are by necessity complex and messy. The image of entanglement is an effective means for thinking about child–plant relationships. Since humans could not survive without plants, we are all “entangled in an assemblage of collective vulnerability” (Lakind & Adsit-Morris, 2018, p. 36). Haraway (2016) also uses tropes of entanglement: string figures with interconnected threads and knots, spider webs and tentacles that stretch across boundaries. It is her notion of making kin, though, that is most evocative for a relational poetics of plant–human interactions: “all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time)” (p. 103).

To enact such relationships, Haraway (2016) notes, we must embrace both responsibility and “response-ability” (114). That is, humans need not only to be accountable for making kin, but also to be accountable for being responsive to the more-than-human. This is the other key aspect of a relational poetics for plant–human interactions. Research has indicated the capacity of children to develop an affective relationship with plants. Villanueva et al. (2018) found that most children by age seven were able to identify plants as living beings to be treated empathetically. Where such empathy is not found, Collado and Sorrel (2019) suggest this is caused by children not seeing plants as having affectivity (p. 46). This is where literature for children has the capacity to enhance child–plant relationships: seeing affective engagement with plants as living entities in imagined realities may foster children’s emotional sense of kinship with and respect for them as sentient lifeforms with agency. Häggström (2017) states that to “deeply understand non-humans we have to share some of their lived experience and be part of their lived time so as to expand and synthesize our horizons” (p. 89). This sharing, challenging in daily living due to different life spans of species, can take place metaphorically within the pages of children’s books. Some might argue that the anthropomorphic characteristics of Beskow’s plant people, which appear as plant–human hybrids (whereas Barker’s flower fairies are human–fairy hybrids), are anthropocentric. However, anthropomorphism can also be thought of as a form of analogic thinking that does not necessarily carry pro-human bias; indeed, anthropomorphism may be a necessary element in humans’ capacity to form attachments with nature (Lumber, Richardson, & Sheffield, 2017). A relational poetics of plant–child relationships in picturebooks is rooted in texts generating a sense of affective kinship with plants in child readers. While I argue that such affective kinship is most clearly present in Elsa Beskow’s work, there are gestures toward this in Cicely Mary Barker’s work as well, but the latter’s flower fairies are less obviously part of intra- and interspecies assemblages.

Meeting Plants: The Flower Fairies of Cicely Mary Barker

The association of plants with fairies is an old one in the English literary tradition. Two of Titania’s attendants in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are Peaseblossom and Mustardseed. It was the Victorians, however, who established a prominent link between fairies and children (Purkiss, 2003, p. 220). Furthermore, there emerged in the latter half of the 19th century a body of literature that linked children with plants and both with fairies (Hines, 2004; Forsberg 2015). The connection between the three was based on the idea that the fairy could be a locus of wonder that would draw children’s attention to the marvels of nature. As Maude Hines (2004) notes, though, such texts were usually intended to improve children, and if there were any relationships imagined between children and plants, they were hierarchical, shaped by “paternalist sympathy” (p. 23). The popularity of nature fairies advanced in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Barker’s biographer, Jane Laing (1995), points to models of plant/fairy/child intersections in the work of Australian Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, whose books and postcards of nature fairies were available in England, and English artist Margaret Tarrant, later a friend of Barker’s, who painted “Do You Believe in Fairies” (1922) the year before Barker’s first flower fairy book, Flower Fairies of the Spring, was published (p. 31). The latter was followed by Flower Fairies of the Summer (1925) and Flower Fairies of the Autumn (1926). Although she produced other flower fairy books into the 1940s, I will take most of my examples from these first three.

Much has been made of Barker’s botanically accurate depictions of plants in these books. Laing (1995) reports that Barker supplemented direct observation with secondary resources, consulting G. Clarke Nuttall’s Wild Flowers as They Grow and experts from the Kew Botanical Gardens, even getting samples from the latter (p. 38). Barker was particularly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, modelling her artistic practice on their commitment to painting from life to capture “nature in minute detail” (Laing, 1995, pp. 35–36). She also painted her children/fairies from life, using children from her sister Dorothy’s kindergarten school or children of neighbours as models. Each plant with its fairy is accompanied by a song presented on the facing page. Although the position of the image varies from recto to verso, the eye is always drawn first to the vivid illustration. Laing approvingly describes Barker’s painting style as more “naturalistic” than that of her friend Tarrant (p. 39). More recently, Carole Scott (2007) has also praised Barker’s work for eschewing the stylized floral designs popularized by the Arts and Crafts movement, calling it “passionately ecological, with an emphasis on botanical correctness and a strong message to children that the natural world be honored and cared for” (p. 291). Certainly, the realistically drawn plants with their accompanying fairies and the helpfully titled verses assist readers to identify different plant species and teach them useful information about the plants’ seasonal lives. However, depicting plants in realistic detail is not sufficient to establish a relational poetics, for while Barker gestures in some of her verses to the plants’ relationships with children or other flora and fauna, she does not create strong images of interactive, multispecies communities.

The images in Barker’s first three fairy books generally feature single fairies/plants; even in the 1930s when she began featuring fairy duos, they still usually belong to the same plant, though in Flower Fairies of the Garden, the Polyanthus and Grape Hyacinth Fairies are depicted in a conversation.³ Visually, there is not a strong sense of individual plants as part of a larger natural community; they seem to be presented as specimens for identification, with each fairy perched on or carrying a sample of its plant. The accompanying verses do, though, reference interspecies interactions. Some fairies/flowers speak of feeding other species, such as the White Clover Fairy (Summer), which invites the bees to take its “honey”, and Groundsel Fairy (Spring), which describes the plant as a treat for the “dicky-birds”. Moreover, some spring flower fairies speak of being heralded by birds, such as the blackbirds and starlings “shouting” about the daffodil. There are also some references to relationships between plants. The Bluebell Fairy (Spring) compares himself to the Primrose, Woodland King to her Queen. In addition, the Lords-and...