The cross-fertilization of the botanical and the literary

Abstract

Plants are highly complex beings with sophisticated strategies for surviving, thriving and coexisting with fellow members of their own and other species on this planet. Yet the Aristotelean notion that plants are passive and insensitive creatures which pervaded the sciences for centuries is still ingrained in society’s approach to plants. In order to extend moral consideration and responsibility to plants, first we need to make them visible. Science helps cure “plant-blindness” by bringing their complexity to the front. However, other forms of plant knowledge contribute to, and at times compensate for what “scientific” thinking leaves out. Resonating Gary Snyder’s depth ecology, an Ecopoetics that incorporates diverse approaches becomes an answer for a worldview that acknowledges the “…autonomy and integrity of the non-human…,” vegetal other. In Howard Nemerov’s “Learning the Trees,” poetry and botany, specifically plant systematics, come together to reflect on the possibilities and limits inherent in each “language” in “hearing” and “speaking” trees. Whereas, with his Greenhouse poems, Theodore Roethke goes into the cracks and crevices of being, entangled with vegetal life, and brings weeds, vegetal outcasts, out of our peripheral vision, transforming the way we see them. Besides exploring the diverse ways mushrooms have fruited in the poetry of Snyder, Mary Oliver and Marvin Bell, the chapter explores how nature literacy, place literacy and science literacy infiltrate the poems and how these tributaries of knowing help create new metaphors, connections and patterns in multispecies story-telling between humans and fungi.