OU\ VERT Symposium and Events Programme

The centrality of the politics of display in botany and natural history are perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, London. Artists have played a key role in botanising, and in the transfer of botanical knowledge, not only as illustrators of the physical characteristics of botanical subjects, but also in advancing the ways that scientists (in this case study, those that study plant sciences at Kew) have understood, named, represented, categorised and related to plants.Highly sensitive, plants produce chemicals in response to touch, and to those in their immediate environment. For instance, orchids store their scents in pouches until they have need of them. Their colours entice the males into the ‘pleasures of pseudocopulation’ (Natasha Myers). This article is part of a series of investigations, see also my Botanical Drift book and recent lecture at HKW 'Orchidisms'.

Woven in Vegetal Fabric: On Plant Becomings, 2022

This essay on speculative botany, inheritance and the Anthropocene responds to a series of drawings titled Herbarium by artist Carlos Molina. In the series, Molina asks how plants might evolve after the Anthropocene, in response to the violent modes of relation that characterise this epoch in the making. The drawings imagine how researchers might encounter and document these new vegetal forms, weaving together indigenous, scientific and more-than-human knowledge.

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics

The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, 2016

This chapter turns on the concept of sensation to sketch some of the ways plants are caught up in contemporary biopolitics. Specifically, the idea of the floral sensation both describes the spectacular qualities of (some) plants that make them particularly desirable commodities in the global floral industry, and gestures to recent research that indicate that plants have sensations that are both similar to and radically different from human ones. Together, these meanings demonstrate that plants are extensively implicated in biopolitical relations, but as agents with specific capacities rather than as passive objects of manipulation. To understand the involvement of active plants in biopolitics, then, re quires attentiveness both to the multiplicity of vegetal involvements in socio-political en tanglements, and to the ways in which plants complicate questions of life itself; ethical and political responses to plant life must therefore move beyond assertions of plant simi larity in the direction of also recognizing their unassimilable differences.

Why Look at Plants? , 2019

"Plant fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. This book argues that the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise our relationship with plants at a time of deep ecological crisis. 'Why Look at Plants?' challenges readers’ pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies". https://brill.com/view/title/33086

Green Letters, 2019

Australian Flora Foundation Newsletter, 2020

I have taught botany for over two decades on topics ranging from plant ecology and diversity to plant anatomy and physiology. Much of my 25 years of teaching has been working with students generating micrographs. I have educated first year students through to honours and supervised higher research degree students. So, when invited to write this piece, my intent was to offer some background on botanical literacy but as I was writing I felt my usual scientific tone drift to include my musings in recent weeks. Global discussions about climate change, and the political situation in Australia, which for too long has focused on short term media cycles, accounting timelines, and 3-year political terms at the expense of our long term survival have rendered conversations about our environment an emotional space. I offer this piece as a homage to plants. There is no doubt that phototrophs support all life on our planet, and this makes the care of our botanical environment critical for the survival of animal life. Plants, and other photosynthetic oxygenic organisms sequester carbon from the atmosphere. But they cannot keep up with the amounts of carbon dioxide for which we humans are responsible. Carbon emissions are able to cross international borders so this is collective 'we'. Our Great Southern Continent in unique and our plants and animals have adapted ways to survive here. These adaptations are being put to the ultimate test as fires increase in intensity and frequency and there is emerging evidence that tree survival is diminishing because of this (Fairman et al. 2019). The recent fires that have raged across millions of hectares have resulted in what ecologists would call a ‘natural experiment’, offering opportunities to assess diversity of biota of the scorched earth, to count the survival rates of vertebrates, and diversity of pollinators visiting the plants as they regenerate in comparison to unburnt areas. As a plant scientist, I found the focus on animals (mainly koalas) to be strange. With the notable exception of the Wollemi Pine, it was as if the trees, the things that were burning, were invisible. This invisibility of plants is referred to in the scholarly literature as ‘plant blindness’ (Wandersee and Schussler 1999), the antidote to which is ‘botanical literacy’ (e.g. Mathes 1983). Throughout my career, I have deliberately shied away from the term ‘plant blindness’, as it is a deficit definition (the inability to see plants or to recognise differences between plant species), and have instead focussed on devising ways to improve engagement of both students and the broader campus community with the botanical world. One innovation has been a mobile app called CampusFlora (currently undergoing redevelopment) where the plants growing on the campuses of the University of Sydney are presented as learning objects making spaces outside of the classroom learning places for botany (e.g. Pettit et al. 2014; Cheung et al. 2015; Dimon et al. 2019). Alongside this initiative I have offer reminders via Yammer posts to the university community prompting us all to stop, look and learn about at the plants in our working environment, which in our campus context, is akin to a botanic garden. Although I have taught botany for a long time, I feel obliged to share my knowledge, noting that I learn something new every year. I feel a bit sad knowing that I will never completely satisfy my botanical curiosity. As a case in point, on a recent field excursion to the Kimberley, it was such a treat to be able to see and touch Boab trees. Their mode of arrival to the Australian landscape remains a mystery to western science (see Baum et al. 1998). It is all so interesting to me. I often ask myself the question: when did it become normal to not be able to recognise and appreciate plants? Does it start when we are young? I ask this because when I have looked at flash cards that are used to teach children to speak, I feel myself getting cross when, for example, the picture of the African savanna with a lion in it is only labelled as ‘lion’. I recall seeing images spruiking national tree day where the inclusion of a bird in the tree branches seemed to be obligatory. Is it true that most people will only pay attention when an animal is present? A study out of the US provides some evidence to confirm that our (human) attention is skewed to animals rather than plants (Balas and Momsen 2014). I wonder if there is a cultural element at play. Over the past 5 or so years I have been privileged to have been invited onto Country and, on every occasion, have been introduced first and foremost to the plants, considered as brothers and sisters (Martin and Mirrboopa, 2003). As a plant-lover, I can’t tell you how much it pleases me that plants are in the forefront of these introductions. Maybe it is worth noting that my background is Celtic with forebears coming to Australia only about 150 years ago. It should also be noted that here I am relying on a fuzzy memory of things my mother told me years ago. My mother, too, was a lover of plants. She would be moved to tears (literally) if she found an off-cut of a plant (a sprig) on the footpath. She would take it home and coax it to grow, usually with success. When my sister passed away, my mother grew one of the white roses from my sister’s wreath into a healthy plant. I recognise that some might view this as dark. But beyond our very existence being contingent on plants (calories, nutrients, oxygen, medicine, shelter) our emotional and cultural wellness is connected with plants. In our celebrations we include plants, roses on Valentine’s day, the bride’s bouquet, chrysanthemums on Mothers’ day. And plants are integral to our commemorations – lilies for death, rosemary for remembrance, trees planted as memory waypoints. More explicitly, the Australian War Memorial offers an opportunity to purchase one of progeny of Gallipoli’s Lone Pine; sunflower seeds from the field in the Ukraine where MH17 was shot down were sent back to Australia to respectfully commemorate those who were not able to come home. There are many more examples. I find it acutely interesting that plants, particularly their flowers, offer us ways to express what our words cannot. Gently and with beauty. Sometimes when I look at our Southern landscape, I edit out the buildings, the roads, the poles and wires, the dams, so that I can imagine what our country was pre-contact, pre-colonisation, pre-invasion. That humans are still able to survive and thrive in remote areas speaks to the remarkable sophistication of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the resilience of a culture derived from and integrated with the land and the sea. I like to think of the time when we will reintegrate with the land. When we die, we decompose. Our molecules disassembled and become available for use by the macro and micro soil biota. Carbon released into the atmosphere is refixed via photosynthesis; our nitrogenous waste is taken up by root systems. Even those who are the loudest climate change deniers will realise their full environmental potential when their bodily chemicals contribute to nutrient cycles to be incorporated into lignin, cellulose, botanical genomes. Incorporated into branches and leaves, I like to think of us dancing joyfully in the treetops together.

The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions, 2018

The Wretched Earth Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions Guest Editors: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018) This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons. Full issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/current Introduction:

Green Letters, 2019

ABSTRACT The ‘dark green’ refers to the green plant-human relationships that undergird human cultures as well as the darkly petroleum-fueled industrialization, mass species extinctions, and strange new ecosystems in the Anthropocene. I consider briefly three petro-culture novels based on various ‘road trips’ that explicitly address both the long-term and massive, albeit oft-ignored, ecological power of plants whether in living vegetal form or in their rotted, processed form of petroleum products: Frank Herbert’s Dune, portraying worm ‘spice’ as a stand-in for oil; Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, eliminating all energy and plant life leaving only hungry humans; and Paolo Bacigalupi’s cli fi novel focusing on calories and virulent plant diseases, The Windup Girl. These novels reveal the overlooked plant power, whether of mutant vegetal diseases, the inevitable death of all human and non-human animals without plants, or the sheer power of plant-based petroleum calories fueling our world in its drive into darkness.

The Botanical Turn exhibition catalog published by Mcintosh Gallery, London Ontario , 2021

Speculative Phytopoetics: Towards Vegetal Kinship How can art help us sidestep capitalist strategies of vegetal objectification and commodification? For too long, the presence of plants in the gallery space has been intended as a humorous counterpoint to the serious rationality of the white cube. Most often, they have been brought into the exhibiting space to metaphorically offset the timelessness of man-made artworks and our obsession with purity and preservation. At other times they have posed as tokens of nature—that which can only truly exist outside the culturally defined perimeter of the gallery. But since the beginning of the new millennium, plants in art have come to mean so much more. The slowing down, the mindfulness, and the presence we experience upon encountering a work of art in the gallery space, or a plant presented as a work of art, lie at the heart of what I call 'speculative phytopoetics': the potential for a fuller world in which we make efforts to meet the non-human halfway instead of repressing it or erasing it. Speculative phytopoetics requires closeness, constancy, patience, and determination. It is a set of non-verbal, non-written biosemiotic codes we develop with individual plants in our homes. It constitutes the perceptible framework of the plant identity—an identity dispersed among branches and leaves and extended across the geography of the domestic space they share with us. Ultimately, speculative phytopoetics is an immanent model of vegetal/human, empathy-based engagement derived from the relational modalities of contemporary art that enables us to reclaim plants from the cultural objectification of capitalism.