The Green Thread

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 Ecocritical Theory and Practice
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 The Green Thread
Dialogues with the Vegetal World

Edited by
Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano,
and John Ryan

LEXINGTON BOOKS
,ANHAM s "OULDER s .EW 9ORK s ,ONDON

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 3 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
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Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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Printed in the United States of America

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 4 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan

SECTION I: DISSEMINATING PLANTS 1

1 What’s Planted in the Event? On the Secret Life
of a Philosophical Concept 3
Michael Marder
2 Seeing Green: The Re-discovery of Plants and Nature’s Wisdom 19
Monica Gagliano
3 Tolkien’s Sonic Trees and Perfumed Herbs: Plant Intelligence
in Middle-earth 37
John Charles Ryan
4 What’s Talking? On the Nostalgic Epistemology
of Plant Communication 59
Stefan Rieger
5 “Wild Memory” as an Anthropocene Heuristic: Cultivating
Ethical Paradigms for Galleries, Museums, and Seed Banks 81
Tom Bristow

SECTION II: POLITICIZING PLANTS 107

6 Preserving Plants in an Era of Extinction: Sentimental and
Scientific Discourse in Mary Thacher Higginson’s “A Dying Race” 109
Jennifer Schell
v

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 vi Contents

7 Laws of the Jungle: The Politics of Contestation

in Cinema about the Amazon 129
Patrícia Vieira
8 Monstrous Flora: Dangerous Cinematic Plants of the Cold War Era 147
Andrew Howe
9 Once Upon a Time in Ombrosa: Italo Calvino
and the Fabulist Pastoral 165
Gioia Woods
10 Vital Plants and Despicable Weeds in Ray Lawrence’s Lantana 183
Guinevere Narraway and Hannah Stark

SECTION III: PERFORMING PLANTS 199

11 Plant-Thinking with Film: Reed, Branch, Flower 201
Graig Uhlin
12 Shrubs and the City: Urban Nature in Rear Window 219
Pansy Duncan
13 The Art of Human to Plant Interaction
Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, and Florian Weil 233
14 The English Garden Effect: Phyto-Performance, Abandoned
Practices, and Endangered Uses 255
Alan Read

Index 281
About the Contributors 295

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 Acknowledgments

This book began to take shape when Michael Marder put the three editors
in touch. We would like to thank Michael for his unwavering support
throughout the different stages of this project.
The editing of the volume would not have been possible without generous
funding by several academic institutions. We are grateful to the CREATEC
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program at Edith Cowan University, the
Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, and
the Early Career Fellowship Support Programs at the University of Western
Australia, as well as to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the
Comparative Literature Program of Georgetown University. We would also
like to acknowledge Yoel Castillo and Mavra Grimonprez’s invaluable assis-
tance in the formatting of the final manuscript.
Finally, we wish to thank Douglas Vakoch, General Editor of the
Ecocritical Theory and Practice series at Lexington Books, and Lindsey
Porambo, Acquisitions Editor in the same press, for their commitment to the
publication of the book and their continued engagement and aid in all steps
of the publication process.

vii

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Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 8 20-11-2015 12:26:27
 Introduction
Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan

In a research article, “Arabidopsis Plants Perform Arithmetic Division to

Prevent Starvation at Night,” scientists describe the ability of the diminutive
mouse-ear cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana (hereafter referred to as “Arabidop-
sis”), to undertake nocturnal mathematical procedures.1 Laboratory evidence
demonstrates that the cress measures its speed of consumption along with the
time remaining until sunrise, then “arithmetically divides these two quantities
to compute the appropriate starch degradation rate.”2 The steady, calculated
expenditure of starch enhances the plant’s fitness overnight and, one could
argue, the efficiency of photosynthesis in the early morning.
Disappointingly (for plant studies scholars), however, by the end of the
technical discussion we are left with neither trace, whiff, nor scratch of the
performing plants themselves. Although the attributes of thinking and learn-
ing are fundamental to arithmetic in the human domain, we find Arabidopsis
construed as a vegetal abacus; as a lean-green-counting-machine geared
toward the ideal of efficient resource consumption. Framed in this discourse,
the apparent aptitude of the species is downplayed by the article’s conclusion,
where mathematical precision is affirmed as crucial to molecular biology and,
more specifically, to plant survival. It appears only as a tantalizing shimmer
that Arabidopsis enacts a kind of intentionality (that of computational logic)
associated with human intelligence.
In this instance, theoretical generalization obscures the very nature of
the plant, as well as the broader implications of its “intelligence.” That
Arabidopsis would defy the tenets of vegetal being is a dramatic flourish,
albeit one constructed and mediated by human linguistics. For the plant, it
is surely nothing unusual to exert such precision without an audience, that
is, without empirical evidence or scientific consensus to prove that it is in
fact agentic. Yet, the use of sophisticated equations by a plant to conserve

ix

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 x Introduction

its nutritional stores might sound merely figurative, since cleverness and
logic are typically ascribed to the zoological, rather than the botanical,
world.3
A growing area of scholarship that, as a whole, could be called plant
studies seeks to redress the long-standing biases that have proscribed plants
from the spheres of intelligence, agency, and ethics.4 This scholarship, in
which we situate this book, tends to embrace interdisciplinary and, even,
transdisciplinary frameworks to interpret the complex lives of plants, includ-
ing their capacities to sense, learn, and behave. Beyond their indispensable
utilitarian value (as food, fiber, and medicine, for instance) and the cautious
mechanistic metaphors we use to describe them (as photosynthetic factories
or aesthetic objects), plants are increasingly recognized as having attributes
historically associated with animal life. While smudging the distinctions
between scientific domains, these findings (sometimes based on ideas from
seminal figures like Jagadish Chandra Bose and Charles Darwin) have also
catalyzed new interpretations of plants in history, society, politics, and
culture.
The leading metaphor of this edited collection, “the green thread”—
echoing poet Dylan Thomas’ expression “the green fuse”—weaves together
the diverse approaches to vegetal being included in the book.5 The image
links, on the one hand, scientific, philosophical, and artistic human cre-
ations to the materiality of the vegetal, a reality reflecting our symbiosis
with oxygen-producing beings. On the other hand, it intimates the dialogues
mentioned in the subtitle of the volume. These refer to the conversations
about plants that transcend the strict disciplinary boundaries separating the
sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, as well as to the possibil-
ity of dialogue with plants as humans become increasingly sensitized to
their enunciations.
The chapters that follow lend themselves to be read by pursuing different
green threads, the choice of which will depend on the specific interests of
the reader. One could, for instance, be guided by a disciplinary thread, and
approach, first of all, the chapters focusing on cinema (chapters 7, 8, 10,
11, and 12) or the ones on literature (chapters 3, 6, and 9). Another thread
running through the entire collection is that of a just and ethical approach to
vegetal beings, a topic subtending all essays but particularly highlighted in
chapters 1, 2, and 5. We propose a guiding thread to the volume that empha-
sizes the different modes of relationality between plants and humans. The
three rhizomatic strands of The Green Thread we suggest—Disseminating,
Politicizing, and Performing Plants—play with the indeterminacy of the
gerund that intentionally leaves us wondering who or what disseminates,
politicizes, and performs the intricate exchanges between human and plant
life.

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 Introduction xi

DISSEMINATING PLANTS

All the chapters in this book share a common thread that binds them together
in a way similar to the connectivity we observe in natural populations of
organisms inhabiting a diverse range of environments. In broad ecological
terms, connectivity in both terrestrial and marine systems is realized by the
movement of organisms from one habitat to another through a process of
dispersal. By making the exchange of individuals between populations and
the colonization of new suitable habitats possible, dispersal holds a central
role in shaping the geographical distribution and the global persistence of
species.6 Nevertheless, it is often a risky business as organisms move away
from or back to their birthplace in a world undergoing continuous change. Be
they animals, plants, bacteria (or even ideas like those in this book), success-
ful arrival to the destination depends on their ability to move, as well as the
environment through which they must move. The first section of the volume,
“Disseminating Plants,” takes this risk of departing from the long-standing
human perception of plants—defined by what they are thought to lack,
including autonomy, agency, consciousness, and, arguably, intelligence—to
explore new territories where the re-conceptualization of vegetal beings as
active agents in social and cultural environments becomes possible.
Regardless of the meaning we have assigned to their way of disseminat-
ing,7 plants have been employing a broad assortment of remarkable dispersal
strategies to disseminate their propagules—including seeds, pollen, and
spores—for population replenishment and habitat colonization for a very
long time.8 In many plants, seeds, pollen, and spores are transported to their
new locales by the wind.9 Like vegetal messages in a bottle, the propagules
of plants growing in or close to water may be entrusted to the flow of rivers
and oceanic currents to be dispersed considerable—even transoceanic—
distances.10 Propagules may also be disseminated mechanically by virtue
of their hooks or barbs that allow them to cling on to the feathers or fur of
animals passing by—which, of course, has inspired the creation of hook-
and-loop fasteners, commonly known as Velcro—or by being launched with
considerable force and often in a very explosive manner, far away from the
parent plant. Some, for example, propel their tiny spores ballistically at initial
speeds of up to 10 meters per second with an acceleration of 105 g,11 while
others catapult their pollen grains into the air as flowers open at lightning
speeds of about 0.5 meters per second.12 (This acceleration is about eight-
hundred times that experienced by astronauts during takeoff.) The explosive
motions of these plants are so fast to compete with movements encountered
in the animal kingdom; and are certainly too fast to be glimpsed by the naked
human eye. They can therefore only be captured by advanced high-speed
video imaging. If, in spite of all these examples, one still espouses the idea

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 xii Introduction

of plants as passive bystanders to their (reproductive) lives, only responding

mechanically to their environments,13 it is at the interface with the animal
world that the inaccuracy of this view truly emerges.
From attractive colors and shapes to irresistible scents and flavors, plants
have evolved a bewildering variety of features to manipulate the behavior of
humans and animals of all sorts and sizes to enhance their dispersal abilities.
Animals, particularly insects, birds, and bats, are most commonly employed
by flowering plants14 as pollinators and are typically rewarded with nectar for
their services.15 Some plants use scatter-hoarding animals, such as corvids
and rodents, to disperse their seeds. As reviewed by Vander Wall (2010),
numerous species of trees produce nutritious seeds and nuts that are attrac-
tive to these animals and that stimulate hoarding behavior.16 However, the
trees make them difficult to handle (e.g., seeds with hard coats) to cause the
animals to hoard instead of eating them straightaway. Additionally, these
trees coordinate the cyclical production of prodigious quantities of nuts (i.e.,
in a boom and bust manner, so that no nuts are produced in some years), yet
synchronized with other individuals over a large area and also across different
species. This strategy, known as “masting,” causes scatter-hoarding animals
to store more food than they can consume. Combined with the production
of seeds and nuts that do not emit strong odors, such strategy increases the
likelihood that a portion of those stored seeds and nuts will not be recovered
and might germinate.
At a quick glance—that is, from the human perspective—some of these
strategies may seem very inefficient. For example, why produce so many
propagules when only a few survive? By taking the plant perspective, how-
ever, we are presented with an incredible level of precision in accomplishing
the task at hand. Although the benefits of scatter-hoarding to plants have often
been viewed as incidental to the activities of animals, what is revealed here is
that plants exploit the behavioral flexibility of animals and manipulate them
so they may behave in a way that benefits the plant.17 Promisingly, such find-
ings are beginning to enter the popular domain with books such as Michael
Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, where he narrates the myriad ways in which
major cultivated plants have shaped and, to some extent, set the course for
human activities through the ages.18 Written for a general audience, this book
offers a refreshingly different view of vegetal life that contradicts the concep-
tion of plants as passive living things. However, it is clear that the unfortunate
idea of plants as passive organisms is still plaguing our perspective, when
distinguished scholars who have engaged with the study of plant behavior,
including matters of plant intelligence and agency, fail to escape the cultural
construction of plants as objects.19
The chapters in this collection are seeds encapsulating a de-objectified
notion of plants and an expanded understanding of their behavior and agency.

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 Introduction xiii

These seeds are disseminated in a manner that reflects the plants themselves—
employing multiple strategies and approaches to spread them widely across
bio-cultural landscapes, so that they would replenish the fragmented habitats
of our minds and mend our relationship with vegetal beings. In particular, the
chapters contributing to section I seminate their seeds by cross-fertilizing the
latest scientific, philosophical, and ecocritical perspectives. For instance, how
can we truly talk about plant agency without understanding their essence?
Michael Marder tackles this question in “What is Planted in the Event? On
the Secret Life of a Philosophical Concept” (chapter 1). He suggests that we
approach the theme of “the event” through vegetal processes, concepts, and
metaphors. Mediated through plant life, the event unfolds along three axes:
(1) that of excrescence, or the out-growth, which is how plants appear in
the world; (2) that of expectation, or the out-look, waiting for germination
and ultimately for fruition; and (3) that of the exception, or the out-take,
which extracts the seed from the closed circuit of potentiality and actuality,
committing it to chance. The nascent model he proposes here sheds light
on our animalist prejudices hidden in ostensibly abstract thought and offers
a fresh starting point for post-metaphysical ontology. He concludes with a
consideration of the strengths and limitations inherent in Martin Heidegger’s
philosophy of the event, as it bears upon the possibility of recasting the ques-
tion of being in light of plant life.
In chapter 2, Monica Gagliano addresses the issue of vegetal agency by
taking readers on a tour of the odd scientific history that has shaped our cur-
rent view of plants as passive organisms and then offering scientific examples
of how plants express themselves through ingenious ways of perceiving
and sensing the world. In “Seeing Green: The Re-discovery of Plants and
Nature’s Wisdom,” she engages the idea that modern societies are afflicted by
a severe disorder known as plant blindness, a pervasive condition inherited
from our philosophical forebears, such as Aristotle, and accountable for the
current disregard for the vegetal world and, hence, environmental destruction.
She then proposes that the solution to this state of affairs rests on a radical
change of perspective, one that de-objectifies plants and recognizes their
inherent worth and dignity.
The discourse on plant agency continues in “Tolkien’s Sonic Trees and
Perfumed Herbs: Plant Intelligence in Middle-earth” (chapter 3), in which
John Ryan analyzes the representation of botanical being and, specifically,
the notion of plant consciousness in J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings—works that,
Ryan argues, present a radical departure from traditional modes of thinking
about plants. Using recent research in phytoacoustics as a framework, the
chapter outlines how Tolkien represents the agency of plant life in Middle-
earth, particularly through sonic trees. However, whereas some trees, such as
Old Man Willow, have the capacity for vocalization, emotion, and memory,

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 xiv Introduction

other kinds of flora are represented in less agentic terms. Ryan calls into
question this uneven treatment of plant consciousness by problematizing
Tolkien’s arborescent thinking.
In chapter 4, science and philosophy are brought together by Stefan Rieger
in “What’s Talking? On the Nostalgic Epistemology of Plant Communica-
tion.” He analyzes the history and current status of plant communication and
examines how science measures plant signals and attempts to rate them as
forms of communication. Yet, he argues that even where signals seem to be
confirmed by technical proof, we are still faced with the question of how to
assign meaning to them, hence raising the issue not only of semiotics, but
also of ontology. Connected to the ontological status of vegetal life is a series
of ethical questions—how do we handle plants? what should we be allowed
to do to them? and what should be forbidden?—all of which bear direct rel-
evance to our conduct toward vegetal life.
In the final chapter of section I, Tom Bristow brings us back to Michael
Marder’s discussion in chapter 1 by reviewing the concept of “the seed” as a
symbol of the cycle of life and the circulation of memory. “‘Wild Memory’
as an Anthropocene Heuristic: Cultivating Ethical Paradigms for Galleries,
Museums, and Seed Banks” (chapter 5) establishes new conceptual terrain,
with applicability to heritage and conservation practices, by examining the
ways in which seeds have been collected and displayed. Through a Foucaul-
dian framework incorporating the work of Marder and philosopher Freya
Mathews, Bristow develops a critique of instrumentalist understandings of
seeds. Three case studies—the gymnosperm gallery (Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew), the Seed Cathedral (Shanghai Expo), and the Silene stenophylla seed
(Deutsches Museum)—demonstrate the dynamics between seeds, memory,
and “banking” practices, as well as the historical interrelation between plants
and public institutions.
As the answers to the questions raised in section I take root and expand
their potential for movement within academic settings and, more importantly,
for further dispersal into the broader society, they will naturally spillover
beyond the limits of our current understanding to nearby areas of percep-
tion and thought—as we see happens in natural ecosystems, from forests to
coral reefs.20 As they do, they will demand our attention within other societal
spheres, and especially our political world, as explored in the next section.

POLITICIZING PLANTS

The chapters in section II of The Green Thread, “Politicizing Plants,” address

the complex relationship between plants and political activity. Aristotle’s foun-
dational definition of the human being as a “political animal” [z on politikon]

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 Introduction xv

proscribed, in one broad stroke, all other living entities from the complex
realm of politics.21 While animals might still approximate political action by
virtue of their propinquity to humans in the Aristotelian hierarchical scale of
life, plants were altogether absent from the picture. And yet flora has been
at the forefront of human politics from very early on. The development of
agricultural societies some twelve thousand years ago, made possible by an
efficient exploitation of certain types of plants, triggered one of the most pro-
found shifts in human history, generating unprecedented levels of inequality
and allowing for the rise of vast empires.22 Already in the twentieth century,
the so-called “Green Revolution,” based upon the mechanization of agricul-
ture, the extensive use of fertilizers, as well as of hybrid and, later, genetically
modified seeds, had profound political consequences. These developments
primarily benefited North America, Europe, and Japan, while contributing to
the relative decline of the Soviet Union, which caught on to hybrid seeds later
than the West, and to the general impoverishment of Africa, unable to fund the
transition from a traditional to an industrial agricultural system.23
But plants do not merely provide the material basis for human political
development, nor do they simply form the backdrop against which politics
takes place. Much of humankind’s history has been framed in terms of a fight
to conquer and rule over a wild and fierce nature, plants being one of the most
salient aspects of this powerful enemy to be subdued.24 If we invert Carl von
Clausewitz’s famous dictum from the early nineteenth century and regard
politics as a continuation of war by other means,25 then our relationship with
vegetal life has always been eminently political. We have struggled to over-
come plants’ hold onto vast swathes of the earth, colonized their territory, and
forced them to become obedient subjects working to fulfill our needs.
The classification of plants as dangerous or useful, invasive or native,
forming a “green Hell” or, instead, mirroring the “earthly Paradise,” notions
discussed in several of the chapters in this section, testifies to the political
nature of our engagement with flora. Going back to jurist Carl Schmitt’s
understanding of politics as the distinction between enemies and friends,26
humans behave politically toward vegetal life by identifying certain of its
elements—poisonous plants, for instance—as enemies to be destroyed, while
others are warmly accepted within the fold of friendship—edible, nutritious
plants such as potatoes or apples, beautiful ones, like orchids, fragrant ones,
such as rosemary, and so on. Humans have forged strategic alliances with
plants, the success of which has determined our survival in a variety of dif-
ferent environments, at the same time as it has contributed to the exponen-
tial expansion of certain vegetal species—rice, maize, or rose bushes, for
instance—to the detriment of others.
Schmitt’s definition of politics highlights the inherently ambiguous
nature of the title of this section. As we have just seen, humans have always

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 xvi Introduction

politicized plants by positing some of them as friendly and others as inimi-

cal to our endeavors. Considering that the core of a political attitude is to
draw a distinction between friends and enemies, however, both animals
and plants can also be said to behave politically. Vegetal beings are able
to recognize their kin, forge alliances with other plants and animals—for
instance, with insects, who act as pollinators—and identify their enemies,
which they try to avoid, for example, by releasing volatiles into the air
or by contracting their leaves.27 To envision “plants” in the expression
“politicizing plants” both as the politicized object and as the politicizing
subject is one of the challenges posed by the chapters in this section. How
do human politics and the politics of plants intersect, clash, or are mutu-
ally reinforced? In which ways has vegetal life informed or even dictated
human political activity? And, in turn, what have been some of the effects
of human politics for flora?
In “Preserving Plants in an Era of Extinction: Sentimental and Sci-
entific Discourse in Mary Thacher Higginson’s ‘A Dying Race’”
(chapter 6), Jennifer Schell foregrounds the political aspects of Higginson’s
text (1876), which advocates for the protection of rare and endangered
woodland wildflowers in an age of massive animal and plant extinctions
in North America. Higginson recognizes that wildflowers “suffer almost
unnoticed” because they have few protectors, and she wishes to lend a voice
to these plants’ plight. In doing so, Schell argues, Higginson deploys two
powerful discourses of her time—the sentimental and the scientific ones. By
skillfully combining these two discursive modes, Higginson creates a late
nineteenth-century, anti-extinction argument that takes advantage of both
reactionary responses to industrial development and progressive responses
to scientific discovery.
The imbrication of plants in human politics is also the focus of Patrícia
Vieira’s “Laws of the Jungle: The Politics of Contestation in Cinema about
the Amazon” (chapter 7). The jungle has traditionally been depicted as a
space hostile to human beings, where the laws of the polis crumble before
the apparent chaos of vegetation. According to Vieira, this anomic environ-
ment invites political and social dissent. She analyzes Werner Herzog’s two
films about the Amazon, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo
(1982), where the unruly natural environment opens the space for political
experimentation. She then turns to two Brazilian movies, Jorge Bodanzky
and Orlando Senna’s Iracema, an Amazonian Love Affair (1975) and Carlos
Diegues’ Bye, Bye, Brazil (1980) that criticize the Brazilian military dictator-
ship’s (1964–1985) plans to impose its iron laws onto the perceived anarchy
of Amazonian nature.
The discussion of cinematic representations of flora and its politicization
continues in Andrew Howe’s “Monstrous Flora: Dangerous Cinematic Plants

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 Introduction xvii

of the Cold War Era” (chapter 8). For Howe, the immensely popular mov-
ies about monstrous flora released in the post-Second World War period—
Little Shop of Horrors (Roger Corman, 1960), The Day of the Triffids (Steve
Sekely, 1962), and The Navy vs. The Night Monsters (Michael A. Hoey,
1966), to name but a few—which combined the horror and sci-fi genres,
reflected anxieties about, among others, the possibility of nuclear war and
genetic mutations; space travel and concerns over accidentally bringing back
extraterrestrial microorganisms, such as spores; and the abuses of Agent
Orange and other defoliants during the Vietnam War. Howe argues that
humans’ ambivalent approach to plant life allowed movies to cast vegetation
in a villainous light as a stand in for social and political fears.
Gioia Woods’ “Once Upon a Time in Ombrosa: Italo Calvino and the
Fabulist Pastoral” (chapter 9) discusses the Italian writer’s botanical imagina-
tion, according to which plants and trees are not fixed ontological objects, but
subject to historically mediated relationships with humans. Woods analyzes
Calvino’s novel Baron in the Trees (1957) in light of twentieth-century land
reforms that dramatically changed human-plant interactions on the Italian
peninsula, from Mussolini’s “Battle for the Grain” to the postwar “economic
miracle” that disrupted centuries-old traditional relationships with the plant
world. According to Woods, Calvino not only uses a dystopian pastoral to
denounce the violence done to the environment in the process of industri-
alization but also portrays flora, and especially trees, as models for more
intimate, solidary, and, ultimately, ethical social relations.
The final chapter in this section, “Vital Plants and Despicable Weeds
in Ray Lawrence’s Lantana,” (chapter 10) by Guinevere Narraway and
Hannah Stark, sees in the contested status of lantana, which has been clas-
sified in Australia as a Weed of National Significance and as one of the
nation’s most invasive imported plants, a sign of enduring political attitudes
toward foreignness and (racial, ethnic, sexual) difference. The authors
address the various meanings of lantana in Australian society through a
close analysis of the 2001 film by the same name. Reading the lantana
against its usual discursive encoding as an evil, unproductive weed and
approaching it, instead, as abundant food source and haven for nonhuman
(and some human) animals, Narraway and Stark contrast the film’s visual
and aural representation of the plant with the stunted and alienated lives of
the movie’s human characters.
The chapters in section II foreground the inextricable political bonds
forged between human beings and the vegetal world. They reveal that, at
the limit, it becomes impossible to distinguish between human politics about
plants and plant politics tout court. The last section of this volume expands
on this interchangeability or, rather, on the irrelevance of such watertight
categories, by turning to performance on, with, and by vegetal beings.

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 17 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 xviii Introduction

PERFORMING PLANTS

Section III invites us to cast a probing light on the concept of performance as

generally denoting an event bounded in time and involving the re-presentation
of actions affecting only human percipients.28 Two pillars of the conventional
notion of performance are the audience (the receivers of the performance) and
the rehearsal (the process through which the performance takes shape prior
to its delivery). As such, a performer is expected to predetermine an arrange-
ment of words, ideas, or actions to maximize their impact on an audience.29
The chapters in this section emphasize that understanding the performativity
of plants requires looking beyond human-focused conceptualizations of per-
formance and appreciating the specific comportment of the vegetal.
During the last few decades, the field of performance studies has done
much to broaden its scope. It is now generally accepted among scholars that
performance refers to events outside of the theater-based dyad of human-
audience, and specifically embraces the transactions of everyday life.30 More
inclusively conceived, a performer (or actant; here also the plant) does (or
conveys) something and a spectator (or participant) observes (or interacts)
with something.31 On the whole, the chapters in this section suggest that per-
AQ: Please
formance studies could expand further, becoming even more encompassing
note that for-
eign words vis-à-vis nonhumans, through a careful analysis of vegetal being. Bearing in
assimilated mind the omnipresence of wild and domesticated plants in our lives (even
into the our most urban ones, as chapter 12 explains) the emphasis on performance as
dictionary
an aspect of the everyday seems eminently suited to the reconceptualization
have been
set in roman of the vegetal world as performative. Nonetheless, we recognize that such
32

as per house a position might be viewed skeptically by some readers. Considering the per-
style. List of ceived fixity and muteness of plants, what sorts of activities should constitute
words: vis-
their performativity, as well as our performances with and of them?
à-vis, mise-
en-scène, The contributors to this section touch upon this vital question but, perhaps
per se, via more importantly, lay the groundwork for further research into the interstices
negativa, between plants and performance. On the one hand, the intrinsic performativ-
coup d’état,
ity of plants is their ecological poiesis: bearing seeds, irrupting in flowers,
sine qua
non, par sprouting rhizomes, uncoiling leaves, attracting pollinators, garnering human
excellence, attention, and mobilizing transnational networks. On the other hand, liv-
33

and ex ing plants34 are also made to perform: in (and as) topiaries, gardens, parks,
nihilo.
reserves, varieties, cultivars, hybrids, genetically modified crops, and even
ok
works of art.35 Consequently, at least two aspects of the expression “perform-
ing plants” become apparent in this section: (a) the inherent poietic perfor-
mativity of the vegetal in its lifeworld and (b) the codes, roles, and milieux in
which humans cast and, in many instances, manipulate, script, or exploit the
botanical. Not forming a rigid binary, the green threads of plant performativ-
ity interweave. Here, we follow C. Nadia Seremetakis’ characterization of

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 18 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 Introduction xix

performance as “poesis, the making of something out of that which was previ-
ously experientially and culturally unmarked [i.e., unexpected].”36 Not only is
the plant intrinsically poietic, so too are its creative engagements with culture,
humanity, and other species. Consider, for instance, the now-common global
narrative of plant poiesis transmuted into plant performance when a wild
species becomes a garden variety, which then escapes its domestication to
become an unruly, uncultivated “weed” in a new locale.37
Anthropologist Richard Bauman argues that performance always engages
the performer’s awareness of his or her actions in reciprocal relation to an
audience that receives and acknowledges the action as a performance.38 Cru-
cially, Bauman places attention on the articulation of the self or body through
the performance. Extending Bauman, we assert that the bodily presence
of vegetal being—its materialities, sensorialities, and physical exchanges
with other species—is central to any consideration of the performing plant.
A corporeal focus is in line with Seremetakis’ emphasis on “material net-
works, independent of the performer”39 but maintains, at the same time,
a steady focus on the materiality of the performing plant. A position that
recognizes the creative agency of plants simultaneously problematizes their
fetishization as aesthetic objects, living or otherwise, in the form of botanical
illustrations, floral displays, wildflower spectacles, herbal salves, and other
everyday examples.
The materiality of plant performance is an implicit theme in the first chapter
of section III, Graig Uhlin’s “Plant-Thinking with Film: Reed, Branch,
Flower” (chapter 11). Building upon Michael Marder’s plant-thinking frame-
work, Uhlin offers an absorbing account of the centrality of the plant, both as
a material and motif, to the early development of cinema. Uhlin characterizes
his process of applying critical plant studies to film as one of “recovery” that
necessarily begins by disclosing film’s material underpinnings in the vegetal
world. Extending a corporeal emphasis to the performing plant, Uhlin estab-
lishes an interconnection between “the body of the plant and the body of the
film [each defined] by their receptivity to light and apparent motion linked
to photosynthesis.” Uhlin then shifts to the mediation of plant being through
the formal aspects of film. The chapter exemplifies the dual notion of plant
performativity as the autopoiesis of plants (their inherent creativity in relation
to their embodiment) and human engagement with vegetal being in cinematic
history.
The mediation of plant being in film is also central to Pansy Duncan’s
“Shrubs and the City: Urban Nature in Rear Window” (chapter 12). Duncan’s
aim is to reclaim the performative agency of potted, urban plant life in the
1954 Alfred Hitchcock mystery thriller. Duncan’s subject matter is signifi-
cant: Hitchcock’s movie was a recipient of four Academy Award nominations
and is arguably one of the most influential films of all time. The director’s

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 19 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 xx Introduction

fixation on flowers, including allusions to life cycles and morphologies, as

well as human-plant affectivities, has hitherto gone relatively unnoticed by
film critics. Of particular interest to Duncan is the jewelry salesman Lars
Thorwald’s obsession with tending zinnias, a recurring scene that represents
the movement of plants in the film “from inconspicuous background to all-
too-obvious foreground, from the status, as it were, of ‘setting’ to ‘plot.’” In
Duncan’s analysis of Rear Window, the flowerbed and its cultivated denizens
are as crucial to the narrative as the more obvious human cast and setting of
the classic. The flowers’ corporeal existence (germinating, blossoming, root-
ing, seasonally dying, flourishing with human care) penetrates the film in a
surprisingly subtle yet forceful manner echoing Uhlin’s analysis in chapter 11.
Moving from film to interactive art, section III turns to Christa Sommerer,
Laurent Mignonneau, and Florian Weil’s “The Art of Human to Plant Interac-
tion” (chapter 13). Sommerer and Mignonneau’s development of participa-
tory plant-based art began over twenty years ago. Since then, the genre of
plant-art has proliferated, with artists around the world involving live plants
as contributors, participants, and interfaces in digital media. The works out-
lined in the chapter engage live plants in the production of three-dimensional
visualizations based approximately on the actual morphological structures of
the vegetal participants. The interfaces (blending real plants and digital struc-
tures) register electrical impulse gradients as human visitors interact with
the plants at various degrees of distance and proximity. The chapter invites
deeper analysis of the role of plant subjectivity, agency, and volition in works
of interactive plant-art, as well as reflection upon the inescapable issue of
technological mediation of vegetal expressiveness.
The Green Thread finally uncoils with Alan Read’s “The English Garden
Effect: Phyto-Performance, Abandoned Practices, and Endangered Uses”
(chapter 14). Read borrows the phrase “English garden effect” to signify
the long history of converting landscapes to cultivated gardens for aesthetic
reasons, and the subsequent persistence of such gardens well after their
abandonment. He uses the idea of the English garden effect as a trigger point
for discussing contemporary site-specific performance projects that engage
plants in more ethical, responsive, and open-ended ways. Read is interested
in vegetal practices inhering within abandoned horticultural sites. Applying
Marder’s plant-thinking, he defines phyto-performance as “practices of co-
presentation alongside and within plant processes.” The documentary theater
work called Lost Gardens (2013) exemplifies phyto-performance and the
resilience of plant life.
Section III extends the notion of performance as an evolving, transgres-
sive, and contested practice by attending closely to the performing-plant.40
To address vegetality in this way is to contribute conceptual richness to the

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 20 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 Introduction xxi

already dynamic fields of performance and critical plant studies, and to posi-
tion scholarly and creative work at their conjunction.

A central concern of The Green Thread is a shift from plants-as-lifeless-

objects to plants-as-living-agents. The chapters in this collection reflect upon
our earthly connections to vegetal beings, which shape all aspects of our
lives. Moreover, the volume exemplifies the richness of the growing field of
plant studies and paves the way for further investigations into the crucial role
of the botanical world in human culture. By offering multiple entry points
into the lifeworlds of plants, this book speaks directly to our need to restore
bonds of kinship with nonhumans and delivers a remedy to our collective
alienation from the rest of nature.41 At a time when we have become mired
in an unnavigable technological labyrinth—where we sacrifice countless
species or ecosystems to the insatiable minotaur of progress—this collection
unspools a thread that will hopefully guide us into greener ground. The vital
strands foregrounded here bind all living beings, inspire our relations with
plants, and affirm our interdependence with and belonging to the natural
world.

NOTES

1. Antonio Scialdone, et al., “Arabidopsis Plants Perform Arithmetic Division to

Prevent Starvation at Night,” eLife (2013). doi: 10.7554/eLife.00669.
2. Ibid., 1.
3. Various terms, including zoocentrism and plant blindness, have been used
to describe this bias. See, for instance, chapter 2 of The Green Thread by Monica
Gagliano.
4. The fields of plant signalling and behavior, human-plant geography, philo-
sophical botany, cultural botany, human-plant studies, and critical plant studies have
contributed, in recent years, to new understandings of the vegetal world.
5. The poem famously opens with the lines “The force that through the green
fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age ; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my
destroyer. / And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose / My youth is bent by the same
wintry fever.” See, Dylan Thomas, “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives
the Flower,” in 18 Poems (London: The Fortune Press, 1934), 13.
6. For an overview of the topic, see Jean Clobert, Etienne Danchin, André A.
Dhondt, and J. D. Nichols, Dispersal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001);
and for more examples, see also Hanna Kokko and Andres Lopez-Sepulcre, “From
Individual Dispersal to Species Ranges: Perspectives for a Changing World,” Science
313 (2006): 789–91; Ophélie Ronce, “How Does It Feel to Be Like a Rolling Stone?
Ten Questions About Dispersal Evolution,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and
Systematics 38 (2007): 231–53.

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 21 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 xxii Introduction

7. The importance of seed dispersal in plants was acknowledged by scientists as

early as Charles Darwin, who discussed seed dispersal in the context of biogeography
in his Origin of the Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 356–64. The scientific
study of seed dispersal, however, only gained full momentum in the 1980s.
8. Leendert Van der Pijl, Principles of Dispersal in Higher Plants (New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1969).
9. For examples, see Josef D. Ackerman, “Abiotic Pollen and Pollination: Eco-
logical, Functional, and Evolutionary Perspectives,” Plant Systematics and Evolu-
tion 222 (2000): 167–85; Ran Nathan et al.,“Mechanisms of Long-distance Dispersal
of Seeds by Wind,” Nature 418 (2002): 409–13; Jesus Muñoz et al., “Wind as a
Long-Distance Dispersal Vehicle in the Southern Hemisphere,” Science 304 (2004):
1144–47.
10. See Susanne R. Renner, “Relaxed Molecular Clocks for Dating Historical
Plant Dispersal Events,” Trends in Plant Science 10 (2005): 550–58.
11. Xavier Noblin et al., “The Fern Sporangium: a Unique Catapult,” Science 335
(2012): 1322.
12. Joan Edwards et al., “A Record-Breaking Pollen Catapult,” Nature 435 (2005):
164.
13. However, seed dispersal “syndromes”—seed characteristics that facilitate dis-
persal—have been observed since the time of Aristotle. These traits may include the
evolution of wing structures and soft hairy parachutes that allow seeds to be carried
further by the wind, for example, as well as traits that attract specific organismsas well delete the
as traits, such as larger and fleshier fruits, to attract specific organisms. For a review of highlighted
expression and
the topic and the interesting biomimetic applications, see Camilla Pandolfi and Dario replace with "as
Izzo, “Biomimetics on Seed Dispersal: Survey and Insights for Space Exploration,” well as traits such
Bioinspiration and Biomimetics 8 (2013): 025003. as larger and
14. Nonetheless, some non-flowering plants, such as cycads, are also pollinated fleshier fruits to
by insects. For example, see Irene Terry et al., “Thrips’ Responses to Thermogenic attract specific
Associated Signals in a Cycad Pollination System: The Interplay of Temperature, organisms."
Light, Humidity and Cone Volatiles,” Functional Ecology 28 (2014): 857–67.
15. For an overview on the topic, see Robert A. Raguso, “Wake Up and Smell the
Roses: the Ecology and Evolution of Floral Scent,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolu-
tion and Systematics 39 (2008): 549–69.
16. See review by Stephen B. Vander Wall, “How Plants Manipulate the Scatter–
hoarding Behaviour of Seed-dispersing Animals,” Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365 (2010): 989–97.
17. Ibid.
18. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New
York: Random House, 2002).
19. Anthony Trewavas, Plant Behaviour and Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2014), vii–viii.
20. In conservation ecology, the so-called “spillover effect” refers to the positive
effect a protected reserve area (i.e., a no-take zone in a marine or terrestrial system,
where no extractive human activities are allowed) has on adjacent unprotected areas
around the reserve. These surrounding areas eventually profit from the nearby greater

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 22 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 Introduction xxiii

densities of fish species or pollinating insects, for instance. Also, the spillover effect
is likely to be even more general, perhaps extending to biodiversity as a whole. For
some examples, see Callum M. Roberts et al., “Effects of Marine Reserves on Adja-
cent Fisheries,” Science 294 (2001): 1920–23; Taylor H. Ricketts et al., “Economic
Value of Tropical Forest to Coffee Production,” Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America 34 (2004): 12579–582; Lars A. Brudvig
et al., “Landscape Connectivity Promotes Plant Biodiversity Spillover into Non-target
Habitats,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America 106 (2009): 9328–32; Garry R. Russ and Angel C. Alcala, “Enhanced Bio-
diversity Beyond Marine Reserve Boundaries: The Cup Spillith Over,” Ecological
Applications 21 (2011): 241–50.
21. Aristotle, Politics, I, 1253a.
22. For an in-depth analysis of the rise of inequality in human societies, see Kent
Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How our Pre-Historic Ances-
tors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012).
23. J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth Century (London and New York: Norton, 2001), 225–26.
24. For a detailed analysis of the ways in which plants, and forests in particular,
have been construed as the obverse of civilization in the Western world, see Robert
Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago and London: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1993).
25. Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is a mere continuation of policy
by other means” in On War. Project Gutenberg. Accessed June 16, 2015, http://www.
gutenberg.org/files/1946/1946-h/1946-h.htm.
26. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 29.
27. For some examples, see Raguso, “Wake Up and Smell the Roses,” Annual
Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 39 (2008): 549–69; Martin Heil and
Jurriaan Ton, “Long-distance Signalling in Plant Defence,” Trends in Plant Science 13
(2008): 264–72; Marcel Dicke, “Behavioural and Community Ecology of Plants that
Cry for Help,” Plant, Cell & Environment 32 (2009): 654–65; Martin Heil and Rich-
ard Karban, “Explaining Evolution of Plant Communication by Airborne Signals,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution 25 (2010): 137–44.
28. Henry Bial, “Part II: What is Performance,” in The Performance Studies
Reader, ed. Henry Bial (London: Routledge, 2004), 57–58.
29. Obvious exceptions to the rehearsal norm include improvisational or open-
ended, interactive performances that engage audience participation. See Cat Hope
and John Ryan, Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media (New York: Bloomsbury,
2014), especially chapters 3–6.
30. The turn toward everyday life in performance studies has been greatly influ-
enced by the work of twentieth-century social scientists. Of prominence are Erving
Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1959) and Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play
(New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 23 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 xxiv Introduction

31. Bial, “Part II,” 57.

32. In using the term performative, we are suggesting that plants actually and
materially (not rhetorically or metaphorically) perform and that the paradigm of per-
formance offers a promising framework for rethinking human-plant relations. Here,
we are conscious of J.L. Austin’s understanding of performativity as a form of speech
that actuates something and should not be appraised as true or false. Although out
of the scope of our discussion in the Introduction, the implications of Austin’s posi-
tion for critical plant studies would be an intriguing addition to the field. See, John
Langshaw Austin, How To Do Things With Words, eds. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa
(London: Oxford University Press, 1976).
33. Consider the example of the Australian mallee, the predominant eucalypt veg-
etation group in semi-arid areas of the country. The mallee lignotuber creates a vast
underground and long-lived network that safeguards the ecosystem from destruction
from fire by enabling multi-stemmed resprouting. See, Ladislav Mucina, et al., “Bio-
geography of Kwongan: Origins, Diversity, Endemism and Vegetation Patterns,” in
Plant Life on the Sandplains in Southwest Australia: A Global Biodiversity Hotspot,
ed. Hans Lambers (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2014),
64–72. The example of the West Australian Christmas Tree is also suggestive of the
intrinsic capacity of plants to perform at the nature-culture conjunction. The Aus-
tralian naturalist Vincent Serventy describes the tree’s uncanny ability to parasitize
underground utility lines in Dryandra: The Story of an Australian Forest (Sydney:
A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1970), 106.
34. The discussion of performance in The Green Thread refers to living plants—
those that have not been converted to a material for food, medicine, or fiber. The use
of living plants and non-living plant materials in performance (defined broadly) is
also a focus within the field of ethnomusicology. See, for example, Svanibor Pet-
tan and Jeff Todd Titon, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
35. John C. Ryan, “‘Plants that Perform for You’? From Floral Aesthetics to Flo-
raesthesis in the Southwest of Western Australia,” Australian Humanities Review 47
(2009): 117–140.
36. C. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transi-
tory,” in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity,
ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 7.
37. Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and
Changed the Way We Think about Nature (London: Profile Books, 2010).
38. Richard Bauman, “Performance,” in International Encyclopedia of Communi-
cations, ed. Erik Barnouw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 262–66.
39. Seremetakis, “The Memory,” 7.
40. Marvin Carlson, “What is Performance,” in The Performance Studies Reader,
ed. Henry Bial (London: Routledge, 2004), 68–73.
41. In the history of the planet, this epoch has been dubbed by many as the Anthro-
pocene. However, Edward O. Wilson—the father of sociobiology—more accurately
refers to this time as the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness. See discussion in Edward
O. Wilson, “Beware the Age of Loneliness,” The Economist, November 18, 2013,

Vieira et al_9781498510592.indb 24 20-11-2015 12:26:27

 Introduction xxv

accessed June 21, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/21589083-man-must-do-

more-preserve-rest-life-earth-warns-edward-o-wilson-professor-emeritus.

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