Opinion: Plant life, vegetal love
Plants, as eco poets have stated, will redeem us if we let them grow
By PRAMOD K NAYAR
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the iconic figure of German Romanticism, in his 1779 poem, ‘The Metamorphosis of Plants’ — hewould later write a full-length book as well — sketches parallels between friendship and plant growth:
how from the germ of acquaintance
Little by little in us a familiar dearness springs up
Preceding Goethe in such vegetal expressions of ardour is of course the famous description in Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’:
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
Marvell casts his passion in the form of aphyto-analogy where the love of the human is measurable as slow-paced but lasting long.
In sharp contrast to thesephyto-analogies we have the artist-critic team, AnaïsTondeur and Michael Marder, inThe Chernobyl Herbarium. The herbarium compiles plants that assimilated radiation and are now radioactive: all to show how anthropogenic technology has caused destruction of plant life. These three examples all point to the plants in the contemporary eco-imagination.
Vegetal Heritage,Homes
‘I am planted beneath the Frangipani flowers’ assures an uncle to the speaker in TagiQolouvaki’s ‘Tell Me a Story’. Qolouvaki’s speaker repeats the Hawaiʻian belief that if the pito(umbilical cord) is not ‘planted’, the child will ‘wander’ and never find home. The birthing image and vegetality climax in the ending of the poem:
Home is a story.
Home is a story where the Frangipani flowers.
Home is defined by a certain arborescence andthe effect of the planting of placental matter and the plants. Brandy Nālani McDougall, of Hawaiʻi, Maui and Kauaʻi lineage, in ‘Haumea’, casts the cosmos as a vegetal image: the ‘stars strewn as seeds’ are ‘sown across the dark soil of space’. The last line of the poem says: ‘come the offshoots of those long germinated seeds’.
Ojibway poet Wayne Keon typesets his poem ‘Replanting the Heritage Tree’ in the form of a tree, the words arranged so as to show the efflorescence of the tree. The poem is a listing of various Native American peoples. The names are placed alphabetically, the A-longkin (Alongquin), Assiniboine at the top of the word-tree and ifeZuni the last word/people at the junction of the soil and subsurface. The poem itself is planted into the paper. Keon aligns Native American heritage with ecological awareness, but also implicitly signals that the Native Americans arerooted in the land.
A
Longkin
Assiniboine
—-
MuskogeeMicmacMissisaugaMohawkMohicanMontagnais
—
TlinkitTsetsautTsinhianTuscororaWinnebagoWyandotYellowkn
ifeZuni
Keon moves between the material and the symbolic to highlight the ancestry of the Native Americans (‘heritage tree’) that must be consciously embedded, whether in the soil of the land or the paper of the book.
Plant-made Worlds
Ecological poetry, especially from the global south, often gestures at the world-making abilities of plants.In Nigerian-British poet Ben Okri’s ‘Ballet of the Unseen’ he concludes:
all our lives an infinite improvisation.
twirling and being reborn.
dying and then resurrecting
at the foot of the tree.
the single tree that spreads its branches in our souls.
the great world tree
Equating burial with planting, poet Simon Ortiz gestures at the cycle of life: ‘Planting’ the dead to sustain life means that the sources of lifeemerge from the ground
John Kinsella’s poetry in Jam Tree Gully is full of acts of nurturing plants and seeing them grow.Linda Hogan, of Chickasaw origin, focuses on the world-healing power of plants.
The fact that plants extend, stretch and reach out both upward and downward is, for many poets, an index of their movement.Subterranean roots seek nutrients and leaves, while shoots, buds, flowers, fruits unfurl. Plant life, write plant humanities scholars Edward Casey and Michael Marder in Plants In Place (2024), ‘connects… in the very place through which humans and other animals locomote horizontally’. Poets argue that the ground we walk, build on, has plant movement underneath. In Linda Hogan’s ‘Heartland’, the speaker perceives something else about the city:
Through the old leather of our feet
city earth with fossils and roots
breathes the heart of soil upward,
the voice of our gods beneath concrete
The concrete structures on the surface do not close off either the breath or voice of the underground. The heart, breath and voice of the underground roots sustain the city. They serve as its foundations, and its life.
Sustaining the life of the city or any place for that matter demands that we plant. Native American poet Simon Ortiz in ‘Old Hills’ describes an anthropological project where university students make a film about an old Indian burying his daughter. Ortiz qualifies the old man’s actions:
The old Indian
Who was burying his daughter
Planting her back into the earth.
Ortiz tells us: the ‘completed film…was about life’. Equating burial with planting, Ortiz gestures at the cycle of life. ‘Planting’ the dead in order to produce and sustain life means that the sources of life—itsroots, to employ a vegetal metaphor —emerge from the ground. ‘To plant’, therefore, is to make the world or renew it.
Remade byPlants
In Kinsella, the ruins of home, the country and the planet are imaged almost entirely in terms of plant-loss. In his powerful poem, ‘In the watery zone the trees speak life-force’ in his volume Insomnia, Kinsella opens with the role of trees: ‘the trees speak life-force/against the loss’. He mourns the fact that the ‘canopy-world/is deleted across the coastal plain’ and that the developers ‘don’t get/the interlinked destinies of wet ground and vegetation’. Kinsella sees the fate of the entire ecosystem as contingent upon the presence and sustainability of the canopy cover. The birds are nourished by the plants:
a native grass tree offering fresh flower spikes…
Bobtail/eating flowers to glow
from the inside out is a joy
no heavy earth-moving equipment can recognise.
The landscape and its inhabitants are mutually dependent, and thenonhumanresidents know this. Kinsella privileges the nonhuman, who alone recognises dependency and relationality. Worlds are ruined when plant life is unmade. But the reverse is also true.
For Ortiz, any remaking of the world taken over by ‘oil and mining companies/who mined the land’ in ‘Returning it Back, You Will Go On’ is possible by a return to vegetal life. Having said that America must ‘give back’ so that the land can ‘regenerate’, Ortiz calls for planting something, and taking care of what has been planted:
watch it grow, nourish it,
so carefully, so gently, sing, talk,
watch it grow, harvest it,
prepare it, pray, speak about it
to others…
With care, compassion, planning and love, says Ortiz, the planter will grow and so will the plant:
you will grow, you will go on,
and you will plant again
and the plant will grow.
Plants, as Goethe and others have stated, will redeem us. If we let them grow.
(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)