This manifesto emphasises the need to move beyond traditional, siloed approaches to education and embrace transdisciplinarity, particularly in the context of the rapidly changing modern world. Transdisciplinary is about collaborating across the sciences and arts, and including the diverse voices beyond the academic, including those of children and families. The manifesto argues that this can help us move beyond simply preparing for a predicted future and instead enable us to actively shape it together. It explores the concept of transdisciplinary creativities, arguing that knowledge and understanding are not limited to language and traditional academic disciplines and that embodied experiences and engaging multiple senses are crucial for effective learning. This approach challenges the separation between humans and the natural world, recognising the interconnectedness of all things, and proposes that education becomes a process of ‘making-with’, where humans and non-humans engage in collaborative knowledge production.

This chapter surveys both the rich tradition of Renaissance botanical literature and some of the critical strategies currently developing around them: ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and critical plant studies. It focuses on the co-existence of myth and science in Renaissance botanical texts and the capacity of Renaissance literature to clarify the advantages and drawbacks of bestowing personhood on plants. Renaissance literature reveals the socio-political, intellectual, and aesthetic processes by which plants became hostage to two separate cultures: the scientific and aesthetic. The chapter also argues that a properly historicised view of Renaissance plant writing might in some respects make early modern texts more relevant to the present by reviving pre-Enlightenment worldviews and pre-Industrial notions of ecological enmeshment.