This chapter looks at the poetic herbarium through the concept of vegetal ontology, addressing works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and especially Emily Dickinson. The epistolary herbaria is a collaborative affair; “a flower in a letter,” like the tendencies of the plants themselves, seeded itself among various writers from across national frontiers. Not only were the form and the content of the messages vegetal but so also was the act of sending, disseminating the herbarium as so many seeds or spores, preceded by lovingly tending to, gathering and preserving flowers. In her work, Dickinson restages the elemental and cosmic clash of viriditas – “greenness,” or the self-refreshing power of finite existence that reaches its apotheosis in plants – and ariditas – “dryness,” or the scorching heat of sin understood in the extra-moral sense of everything that contravenes life and its renewal. Dickinson’s approach is at the same time allegorical and literal, plants providing her with a way of dealing with the inexorability of death. Analogous practices and preferences, like genres and authors, developed across nationalities, geographies, and time periods.

This chapter examines the representation of the common tree rhododendron in two nineteenth-century collections of botanical illustrations. The first is an engraving from Exotic Flora (1823–7), a book series compiled by English botanist William Jackson Hooker. The second is a watercolor from Specimens of Flowering Plants (c. 1830s–40s), an album that was commissioned by British Captain Frederick Parr from five Indian artists in the state of Madras (Tamil Nadu). When compared with one another, these two works not only reflect the importance of images to colonial plant science, but also raise questions about the power of botanical illustration to visualize the complexities of a large environment. Placing these books into dialogue with one another allows us to reevaluate the environmental affordances of botanical illustration as a genre, while also demonstrating how emerging theories from critical plant studies can enrich our understanding of Anglo-Indian scientific exchanges in the nineteenth century.

This chapter explores two subfields of nineteenth-century horticultural practice – plant miniaturization and plant assimilation – to demonstrate indirect approaches to addressing botanical agency. Given differences of lifespan, size, cognition, and communication, as well as the distance of time, Victorian writing requires this indirect approach. In the case of plant miniaturization (bonsai), described admiringly in British travel narratives but bemoaned by champions of native plant life from William Wordsworth to H. Rider Haggard, writerly attention or disregard to plant suffering illuminates broader concerns of plant emotion and subjectivity. In the case of plant assimilation or its amplified parallel, plant invasiveness, human framings of plant reproduction point out the cultural constraints on plant life. When named plants reproduce across the page as well as through the garden bed, their taxonomic and vernacular incursions into nineteenth-century poetry and prose show a further assertion of expanded plant influence on the Victorian reading mind.

In PA I.5, Aristotle encourages his audience to engage in a novel kind of philosophy: the scientific inquiry into animals and plants. What Aristotle is exhorting his readers to do, biology, is newly and originally conceived, but the literary technique employed – protreptic speech – is one of the oldest and most traditional kinds of philosophical discourse. In his earlier popular dialogue the Protrepticus, Aristotle had defended and promoted the Academic conception of philosophy and its preoccupation with theoretical and mathematical sciences such as astronomy by discussing the clarity of such sciences and the excellence of their objects. In the later protreptic to biology, he adapted these earlier arguments, arguing that biology also has excellent objects and offers a kind of clarity that may even surpass astronomy. These arguments turn out to be part of a general rhetorical strategy for comparing and rank-ordering sciences that was theorized in the Topics and Rhetoric.

This chapter focuses on the domain of the vegetative soul that represents some of the simplest activities that distinguish the organic from the inorganic. It examines the central vegetative system consisting of the liver, the veins and their supporting organs, as well as the vegetative capacities present in all the tissues that are subservient to this system. The chapter not only discusses the relationship between the central parts and capacities in all of the body, but also examines the ways in which these capacities manifest themselves, arguing they represent Galen’s attempts to grapple with the notion of basic vitality. On some occasions, Galen also calls them ‘demiurgic’, implying a creative capacity. A discussion of how he engages with the pre-existing philosophical tradition and the notion of a biological demiurge helps to delineate the scope of these capacities.

While animals and plants have been part of Ottoman studies for a long time, the way students of history study them has changed over time. This chapter traces that change and its implications. It first describes the literature acknowledging the significance of plants and animals (such as wheat, cotton, tobacco, and sheep) as commodities in both domestic and world markets, but viewing their role in history as basically secondary to humans. Then it provides an overview of studies on the cultural representations of animals and plants, and finally focuses on recent historiography that sees nonhuman species as active agents of Ottoman history. The latter approach, the chapter argues, provides a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of the past as it highlights the role played by nonhuman actors, ranging from crop plants to street dogs and mosquitos, in transformations that the empire underwent in the course of centuries.

This chapter focusses on ubiquitous plant presences in some of the literatures of southern Africa, essentially of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Both Indigenous societies and incursive colonial regimes depended fundamentally on plant life for shelter, food, materials, and aesthetics of belonging. Colonials imported numerous alien species, both deliberately cultivated and inadvertently ‘released’, with incalculable impacts on the subcontinent’s variegated local environments. The governing divide between ‘indigenous’ and ‘alien’, however, is complicated by sundry blurrings and ironic cross-overs. These dynamics, affecting commercial, societal, and emotional dimensions alike, are explored through some selected nodes, particularly the iconography of Eden or Arcadia; the complex aesthetic ecology of the suburban garden; and the treatment of trees, especially the native yellowwood and the alien jacaranda.

The plant as spectacle and specimen loomed large at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which celebrated human innovation in horticulture and botany. In the decades that followed, writers responded to the images of plant life and floral motifs that saturated visual culture, from botanical illustrations and flower painting to the new decorative schema developed by the Bloomsbury circle. This chapter traces the ways in which plants were revealed in new and sometimes unsettling forms in the literature, science and art of the fin de siècle and first decades of the twentieth century. While some writers looked at plants as if they were artworks, discoveries about plant sentience challenged existing taxonomies and critiques of materialism encouraged alternative understandings of vegetal life to emerge. The plant literature explored here – ranging across poetry, fiction, and art writing– turns out to offer a mirror for its authors’ aesthetic, ethical, and botanical concerns.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shakespeare’s plants became the focus of popular printed books. Especially in the post-war period these volumes appear to have fed a thirst for nativist and nationalist consolation. The genre was for many years bound up with the practice – in Britain and America – of planting Shakespeare gardens in civic and public spaces. However, the popular modern culture of Shakespeare’s flowers diverts considerably from the ways in which plants appeared on the Shakespearean stage. In the plays, plants are used to question those social practices assumed to be inherently stable, even part of the natural order: kingship, Englishness, hierarchies of learning, even the very premise that plants (and the people who pick them) as themselves ‘native’. Close attention to Shakespeare’s dramatic use of plants therefore reveals a certain resistance to the very instincts – nationalist and nativist, pastoralist and conservative – for which his plants have been utilised in the last two centuries.

This chapter examines early Christian (Patristic) literature to see the confluence of Graeco-Roman literature with its topoi and evocations of landscapes or plants as habitats and attributes of the gods, with scriptural allusions to the fruitfulness of the earth as a sign of divine bounty and pleasure. Central to early Christian allusions to plants is Eden, site of the Fall, the defining trauma of human exile from it, and the displacement of paradise to an afterlife. The first part of the chapter charts the development of accounts of creation and Eden, starting with Philo of Alexandria, with whom hexaemeral literature (referring to the six days of creation) originates, in synthesis with Plato’s Timaeus. If plants are elements in the universal ordering of species at creation, they are also topoi in rhetorical-inventive analogies for literary genres or organisation. The relations between scriptural-exegetical and classical-literary are therefore not merely a question of iconography or attribute, but of inventive figures. Related to the meadow is the figure of the garland, which will be so central to Christian symbolism, with its diverse significance as wreath, crown, or varied garland. If the rosary provides one case of the Christian development of classical poetic type, albeit beyond the timeframe of early Christianity, another case, little explored in its literary antecedents, is the crown of thorns, central instrument of Christ’s passion, which is in the Greek of the Gospels a wreath of acanthus.

This chapter focuses on three case studies from California that provide a laboratory for investigating value conflicts. One case involves feral goats and endemic plants on San Clemente Island. What initially presents as a textbook conflict between sentientism and biocentrism turns out to engage a host of other values. A second case concerns tule elk and cattle in Point Reyes National Seashore. A variety of values are in play, but the primary conflict is between an endangered species and a population of animals that humans use for food. The third case involves Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep and mountain lions. Both of these species have depleted populations and restricted ranges due to human action, and both are under intensive management. Their interests conflict and humans cannot remove themselves from the conflict.

Many philosophers who endorse an environmental ethic are uneasy with animal protectionist philosophies. They reject sentientism – the view that sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability – in favor of biocentrism, the view that being alive is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability. It is difficult to characterize both sentience and being alive in ways that are both informative and noncontroversial. Some environmental philosophers reject the individualism of both these views, and embrace instead holistic views that place such entities as ecosystems at the center of moral concern. Deep ecologists go even further, making it difficult to know how to live in accordance with their principles. Such views provide insight, but seem to abandon the fundamental questions of ethics.

This chapter traces John Clare’s unusual lifelong sympathy with plants. The bard of wildflowers wrote about the botanical world again and again, not only drawing on plants for numerous poems, but also recording his observations in botanical lists and Natural History Letters. Other men’s flowers, which he came across in his reading, cross-fertilized with his own habitual experience of local flora, to create poetry of startling freshness. The chapter draws primarily on Clare’s writings on flowers, trees, and grass but is also indebted to the work of key botanical critics and writers such as Molly Mahood and Richard Mabey, as well as recent environmental trends in Clare studies. Clare’s closely observed, celebratory, and elegiac poetry of plants demonstrates his vital importance for the twenty-first century, by alerting us to the irreplaceable value of the natural world.

This chapter contains an outline of the book and of its main argument. It concentrates on the deep structure of the Peripatetic science of perishable living beings, which consists in separate but coordinated studies of animals and plants. It provides the reader with an initial idea of the contents of the book with an emphasis on the epistemic requirements that shape the Peripatetic study of perishable life.

Theophrastus shares Aristotle’s methodological insight that the scientific inquiry unfolds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stage of inquiry, respectively. This chapter shows that we should speak of two main stages of inquiry because the explanatory stage itself may unfold in various stages. In other words, the work that is required to arrive at an adequate (i.e., scientific) explanation may take place in steps and may require accomplishing different tasks. The chapter looks in some detail at how Theophrastus adopts this style of inquiry in his explanation of the various ways in which plants propagate.

The first and most important step into the Peripatetic study of living beings is the observation that life takes many forms. In the sublunary world, it takes the form of plant and animal life (with human life as a special kind of animal life). When Aristotle and Theophrastus speak of animals and plants, they never assume that they are a single form of life. This is confirmed by what we read at the outset of the Meteorology, where Aristotle outlines an ambitious research program that ends with separate yet coordinated studies of “animals and plants.” Whether there is unity, and how much unity there is, in these two studies remains an open question at the outset of the Meteorology. But when we look at the two corpora of writings that Aristotle and Theophrastus have left on the topic of animals and plants, we see that the unity they are able secure is limited. Last but not least, this chapter shows that the study of the nutritive soul advanced in Aristotle’s De anima cannot secure unity within the study of animals and plants.