GAIA Dialogues between the book arts, natural sciences & plant humanities


PLANTS ON THE PAGE


Isabel Hofmeyr
Professor Emeritus, University of the Witwatersrand

In large part, this is an exhibition about plant, print and page. It enters a conversation about the relationship of plants and print which have long been related materially, linguistically, conceptually and metaphorically. Paper contains cellulose; book parts are names for plants (leaf, fascicle). Gardens were often thought of as anthologies and vice versa. Metaphors like 'turn over a new leaf' combine the act of paging through a book with the implicit idea of new plant life.

Plants have of course always featured in print, whether in fiction and non-fiction, botanical writing, scientific textbooks, gardening manuals, seed catalogues. In fiction and much non-fiction, plants have generally been relegated to the background (although plants do occasionally get a starring role in stories like Jack and the Beanstalk or Day of the Triffids). In botany books, gardening manuals and such like plants are more central are presented as subjects of scientific classification, or as objects in the marketplace.

On virtually any page we read, we are likely to encounter plant life in some form whether on wallpaper, in wine or coffee, in medicines, or in gardens and landscape. Yet, as in life, we seldom notice them. The rapidly growing field of plant humanities/critical plant studies attempts to address this plant blindness, asking how we might place plants more centrally in our understanding of the world. How might we navigate between “the biosemiotics of vegetal life and human signification”.1 This burgeoning plant theory has started to chart the implications of vegetal sentience, intelligence and communication for definitions of the human, or rather post-human.

One starting point for this scholarship is to address the marginalization of plants, or in Michael Marder's words, to undo their location as “the weeds of metaphysics: devalued, unwanted in its carefully cultivated garden, yet growing in-between the classical categories of the thing, the animal, and the human”.2 Across a range of disciplines, these investigations offer rich approaches on how to think with, or amidst plants. One important emphasis has been on how plants undo the human, or '“render the human unidentifiable to itself”.3 Plant time relativizes human time; plant 'language' questions human ideas of speech as necessarily vocalized (“articulation without saying” in Marder's words); plant 'wisdom' with its “nonconscious intentionality” redefines intelligence through demonstrating networking not based in organs. 4 Studies of the mediation and remediation of plants in literary and visual texts illustrate the multiple ways in which these reconfigure the human, the elemental, the chemical, linking to traditions of Indigenous studies, radical Black studies and queer studies that have long relativized 'the human'. 5 As “green buffers of the Anthropocene”, plants occupy debate as new biopolitical and ethical subjects. 6 As AI engages with chlorophyl, measuring the efficiency of photosynthesis for “precision agriculture”, plants generate pressing debates–are plants as much algorithmic as AI? 7

Within this field, and for the purposes of this exhibition, it may be useful to think about the lives of plants on the page. One major tradition has been botanical illustration, an imperial technology which extracted plants from their settings and made them portable and amenable to hierarchical systems of classification. An allied technology was the herbarium sheet which translated a three-dimensional plant into a pressed two-dimensional specimen. The dried plant matter (for the dried garden, hortus siccus, the original term for a herbarium) is 'specimenized' through the visual strategy of its layout and the galaxy of miniature texts that surround it: these include details of where, when and by whom the plant was collected, stamps of the hosting herbarium, notes in pencil, maps, tags, stickers, drawings, tiny envelopes (fragment packs) containing seeds and flowers, and more recently the name or initial of the person doing the mounting. The information of where and when the plant was collected inducts the specimen into Gregorian time and conjugates its past living life with its present dead paper life.

Yet, however much these plants are specimens, each plant can assert its stubborn materiality, proving themselves unscalable to the page. Tall specimens are folded over double, while others are pasted downwards or sideways, upsetting the implied model of botanical illustration where plants are always upright and neatly scaled to the page. Elsewhere plants that have not been properly dried create a 'caul' around themselves as the moisture seeps into the page, often buckling it at the same time. The particular size and shape of the specimen creates a varied aesthetic across the exsiccatae (collection of dried specimens). Some specimens are tiny, huddling on the page like squashed calligraphy. Others swirl like arabesques or are elegantly minimalist like an ikebana arrangement. Yet others sprawl across the folio sheet and are pasted down with parallel pieces of tape so that it looks as if the plant is behind a fence.

Yet, the herbarium has proved an inspiration for many artists and a source of fascination for individuals who have created their own dried plant collections. The latter group include Rosseau, Goethe, Emily Dickinson, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Rosa Luxembourg, Paul Klee. Along with the latter, there are vibrant artistic traditions informed by herbarium design. In her discussion of “Herbarium as Muse”, Maura Flannery lists a range of visual artists whose work draws inspiration from the herbarium: these include Joseph Beuys, Mark Dion, John Sarra, Karl Blossfeldt, Victoria Crowe, Rachel Pedder-Smith and Joanne Kaar.

Turning to a small selection of the many books chosen for this exhibition, one of the most unusual is Necrophagus (2013) (pg.57) from the series Somata by Kathleen Sawyer. Unlike John Carrera's Putrefatti (1995) (pg.42) and Ryoko Adachi's Hole - From My Beanstalk (2008) (pg.52) in which the activities of insects and the resultant denudation of the substrate are imaginatively etched, typographically and photographically depicted on the page, Necrophagus presents the actual decaying of the book's material as a found object. The pages are stained, wrinkled and eaten away by liquid, soil and insect agents; these indexical traces embody the history of the book as a skin and organs that have experienced such attack, aging and decay. Onto the distressed pages Sawyer has drawn minute pen images of the larva (maggot), pupa, and adult of the probable fly that co-authored this work. The American photographer Rosamond Wolff Purcell (born 1942) is known for her photographic works that explore subjects in natural history, science, and biology, including the aestheticization of the decaying book. Her work has inspired research on the topic of books in the air and atmosphere, and on insects and archives and how one thinks about insect damage and books not simply as something that you must read around, but how one would read with the insect or damage.

The herbarium sheet containing a pressed two-dimensional specimen is represented on this exhibition by two intriguing books. The first is 16 dm2 an essay (1979) (pg.29) by Dutch-born horticulturist, biologist and ecological artist Herman de Vries. The book contains a series of 473 plants, collected from a 40 × 40 cm section of meadow near Eschenau, Austria. The book is divided into 16 parts, each representing one of the 16 squares into which the plot of land was divided, and the plants are reproduced in greyscale Xerox-copy on A4 paper. The location of each plant is marked and numbered on the front of each page. De Vries provides photographs of the chosen patch of meadow before and after the excavation, and this evidence suggests that each plant is reproduced to its true scale, avoiding the aforementioned folding over double of specimens or downwards or sideways pasting of others. 16 dm2 an essay is a fascinating intersection of book art and herbarium, conceptual artwork and scientific enquiry.

The second book, which also dextrously illuminates these overlapping fields of investigation is James Walsh's The Arctic Plants of New York City (2015) (pg.38). Sparked by a simple question–are there any plants that grow in both the Arctic and New York City? Walsh discovered that there are many.

With actual plant specimens included in the book it is a veritable herbarium and a feat of book production and editioning. Its scientific rigour manifests in a reproduction of the index from Nicholas Polunin's Circumpolar Arctic Flora (1959), in which the author has marked in red pen the 88 Arctic plants that occur in New York City. But where its focus shifts from the conventions of the herbarium's dry data can be found in the accompanying poetic texts that surround the specimens, and their seeping pigmented 'caul' which sometimes imprint themselves on facing pages. Granary Books who published the book state that, amongst the mounted botanical specimens, it “combines personal letters, poetry, prose essay, scholarly research, botanical exploration, and artistic investigation … creating a field of word-objects interacting with plant-objects …touch[ing] on the souls of plants, their use in medicine and as spurs to mental travel, their transience, their migrations, their meaning.”8 The conversations of 'word-objects' and 'plant-objects' have long unfolded on the page, whether through illustration or printed discourse. The books on this exhibition capture the many dimensions in which these old allies illuminate each other.

  1. Michael Marder, “To Hear Plants Speak”, in The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, eds, Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, Patricia Vieira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 2630/7902 (Kindle).
  2. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 90.
  3. Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 19.
  4. Marder, “To Hear”, 2823/7902; Marder, Plant-thinking, 12.
  5. Meeker and Szabari, Radical Botany, Chapter 7.
  6. Ioan Negrutiu, Michael W. Frohlich, Olivier Hamant, “Flowering Plants in the Anthropocene: A Political Agenda”, Trends in Plant Science 25 (4) 2020: 349-368.
  7. Jeyadev Needhi, “The Intersection of AI and Plants: Cultivating the Future with Chlorophyll”, Medium, 30 May 2024.
  8. James Walsh. The Arctic Plants of New York City. Available https://www.granarybooks.com/pages/books/GB_169/james-walsh/the-arctic-plants-of-new-york-city?soldItem=true accessed 30 July 2025.

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