Table Of ContentThe Language of Plants
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Th e L a n g u a g e
o f P l a n t s
Science, Philosophy,
Literature
Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan,
and Patrícia Vieira, Editors
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “Breaking the Silence— Language and
the Making of Meaning in Plants,” Ecopsychology 7, no. 3 (September 2015): 145– 52. DOI:
10.1089/eco.2015.0023. An earlier version of chapter 11 was published as “Phytographia:
Literature as Plant Writing,” Environmental Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2015): 205– 20.
Poetry in chapter 14 was previously published as Elisabeth Bletsoe, “Stinking Iris” and
“The Leafy Speaker,” in Pharmacopoeia and Early Selected Works (Exeter: Shearsman
Books, 2010). Copyright Elisabeth Bletsoe, 1999, 2010. Reprinted with permission.
Poetry in chapter 14 was previously published as “The White Iris,” “The Jacob’s
Ladder,” “The White Rose,” “Matins,” and “Scilla” in Louise Glück, The Wild Iris.
Published in the United States by Harper Collins Publishers, 1992, and in the United
Kingdom by Carcanet Press Ltd., 1996. Copyright 1992 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by
permission of Harper Collins Publishers and Carcanet Press Ltd.
Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gagliano, Monica, 1976– editor. | Ryan, John (John Charles) (Poet),
editor. | Vieira, Patrícia I., 1977– editor.
Title: The language of plants : science, philosophy, literature / Monica
Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira, editors.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016037101 | ISBN 978-1-5179-0184-4 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0185-1 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Plant cellular signal transduction. | Plant cell interaction.
| Plant ecophysiology. | Chemical ecology.
Classifi cation: LCC QK725 .L275 2017 | DDC 571.7/42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037101
Contents
Introduction vii
Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira
Part I. Science
1. The Language of Plant Communication (and How It
Compares to Animal Communication) 3
Richard Karban
2. Speaking in Chemical Tongues: Decoding the
Language of Plant Volatiles 27
Robert A. Raguso and André Kessler
3. Unraveling the “Radiometric Signals” from Green Leaves 62
Christian Nansen
4. Breaking the Silence: Green Mudras and
the Faculty of Language in Plants 84
Monica Gagliano
Part II. Philosophy
5. To Hear Plants Speak 103
Michael Marder
6. What the Vegetal World Says to Us 126
Luce Irigaray
7. The Intelligence of Plants and the Problem of Language:
A Wittgensteinian Approach 136
Nancy E. Baker
8. A Tree by Any Other Name: Language Use
and Linguistic Responsibility 155
Karen L. F. Houle
9. What Vegetables Are Saying about Themselves 173
Timothy Morton
Part III. Literature
10. The Language of Flowers in Popular Culture and Botany 193
Isabel Kranz
11. Phytographia: Literature as Plant Writing 215
Patrícia Vieira
12. Insinuations: Thinking Plant Politics
with The Day of the Triffi ds 234
Joni Adamson and Catriona Sandilands
13. What the Plant Says: Plant Narrators
and the Ecosocial Imaginary 253
Erin James
14. In the Key of Green? The Silent Voices of Plants in Poetry 273
John C. Ryan
Acknowledgments 297
Contributors 299
Index 303
Introduction
Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira
Plants and Us
Plants are perhaps the most fundamental form of life, providing suste-
nance, and thus enabling the existence of all animals, including us
humans. Their evolutionary transition from Paleozoic aquatic begin-
nings to a vegetative life out of water is undoubtedly one of the farthest-
reaching events in the history of the earth. It was the silent yet relentless
colonization of terrestrial environments by the earliest land plants that
transformed the global landscape and radically altered the geochemical
cycles of the planet. This resulted in lowered concentrations of atmo-
spheric carbon dioxide and thus set the scene for the emergence of ter-
restrial animals about 350 million years ago. Over the subsequent circa
200 million years, as Mesozoic forests of ferns, conifers, and cycads fl our-
ished and fl owering plants made their appearance, so the fi rst reptiles,
and then mammals and birds emerged. The fi rst Homo species did not
arise until about 2.8 million years ago and our modern human ances-
tors were nowhere to be seen until approximately 0.05 million years ago.
If millions of years could be measured in meters, the history of plants
would equate to a 500- meter- long walk, while ours would be no more
than a few centimeters—a notably brief exhalation in the history of our
planet, yet one our species has branded with a sense of utmost preemi-
nence in search for its own meaning.
While humans have often pondered their place in the midst of the
myriad life forms that inhabit the earth, plants have not always been at
the forefront of their concerns. Science has traditionally privileged the
study of animals, in an attempt to pinpoint what distinguishes us from
our closest relatives in the evolutionary scale. Although both Darwin-
ian and post-D arwinian scientifi c views emphasized the continuities that
bind all life together with its rich diversity— in Darwin’s own theory of
descent with modifi cation, according to which the process of natural
vii
Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira
selection explains life in terms of both unity by descent and diversity by
modifi cation1—, the study of animals has remained the central scientifi c
concern. A quick survey of the scientifi c literature of the last fi ve years
reveals that, on average, only one paper is published on plants for every
two published on animals.2 This tendency is evident among the leading
multidisciplinary scientifi c journals, such as Nature and Science, and it is
also found among the top journals that cover the specifi c area of biol-
ogy, where only 35 percent of papers are published on plants. As in other
cases of “taxonomic chauvinism,” the level of personal interest in diff er-
ent kinds of organisms, and particularly a preference for vertebrates such
as mammals and birds, seems to be the source of the partiality among
scientists.3 Theorists have referred to the emphasis on animals as “zoo-
centrism” and have argued that it reinforces the privileging of animals
as sentient, intelligent, and mobile, at the same time as it contributes to
the marginalization of plants as relatively passive life forms.4 No matter
what we call it, the bias is real and has resulted in an impoverished
appreciation of plants and their role in the natural world.5
Science has recently noticed that our “plant blindness”6 and con-
comitant predilection for animals over plants might be ancestrally
derived, as our visual attention toward human and nonhuman animals
is inherently higher than when we see plants.7 This extremely prevalent
condition, whereby we struggle even to notice plants as being alive, clearly
remains a signifi cant source of negligence toward the botanical world
and, more generally, the environment. While our inattention to plants
might be due to a perceptual bias embedded in our physiology, it is also
true that botany has been a part of medicine for most of ancient history
and throughout the medieval era. During this time, the major focus of
interest was not the being of plants but rather their usefulness to humans
as food and medicine. A more integrated ecological thinking of plants
was only to emerge about a century ago, when, in 1895, Eugenius Warm-
ing published Plantesamfund, the fi rst book on plant ecology, where
he introduced new ideas on plant communities, their adaptations, and
environmental infl uences.8 The history of the relationship between
humans and plants suggests, then, that the causal root of plant blindness
goes beyond physiological underpinnings and harks back, in Matthew
Hall’s words, to a deeply ingrained “cultural- philosophical attitude.”9
viii
Introduction
Similarly to science, philosophy has historically focused on the
study of human beings, foregrounding what distinguishes us from our
closest evolutionary relatives. The human has traditionally been under-
stood, as Aristotle famously put it, as a special, “political” animal gifted
with logos— reason, speech, language.10 The living beings deemed to be
more akin to humanity were regarded as inherently superior to the more
dissimilar ones. Such gradation was codifi ed in the so-c alled scala
naturae, literally, the “ladder of nature,” also known as the “great chain of
being.” This view of the world that coalesced during Greek Neoplatonism
and remained highly infl uential throughout the medieval and early mod-
ern periods in Europe posited a hierarchical universe where inanimate
beings occupied the lowest level of the scale, followed by plants, animals,
humans, angels, and, fi nally, God, who stood at the top of the pyrami-
dal construction as the image of perfection. Even though continuity was
one of the key principles of the chain, with all beings related to one
another as just another gradation of divine power, those entities placed
further down the scale were thought to be inferior to the ones higher
up. Plants, ranking just above inanimate things, were therefore consid-
ered to be less perfect than animals and humans, a lower form of life
that could not compete in complexity with the higher ones.
The notion that plants are imperfect and ontologically lacking the
characteristics that render animals superior, including movement, inten-
tionality, or the ability to communicate, was to remain a philoso phical
tenet long after the Renaissance. If some vegetal beings, and particu-
larly their fl owers, have long been recognized as a source of aesthetic
pleasure, most plants continued to be relegated to the margins of phi-
losophy as less worthy of attention than animals. For instance, in his
Philosophy of Nature (1842), G. W. F. Hegel, who decisively infl uenced con-
temporary thought, argued that plants are but a step to be dialectically
superseded by animals in the fulfi llment of Spirit in nature. According
to Hegel, plants are unable to preserve “inwardly the unity of the self,”
that is, to return to themselves, and, thus, do not evince the subjectivity
and inwardness that animals display in nuce and that is then fully devel-
oped in human self- consciousness.11
The favoring of animals, and especially mammals, over plants
continues in contemporary philosophy. While works dissecting the
ix
