The Question as posed:
Some forerunners:
What are YOUR relations with plants? October 2021Symbiotic relationships November 2022
my Antidotes and Analgesics June 2024
and The Plant Kingdom collection, mostly summer 2024Wende's Plant Question June 2024
What's your favorite tree? June 2024
Plant Haiku from the AT Fall 2002
So the task of the moment is to venture beyond where I've already been, and to find some new integration of my own plants-in-life saga.
The primary focus of attention for me (in my anthropologist guise) has been plant domestication: the continuing saga of the coevolution of Homo sapiens and the Plant Kingdom, and I can go on and on with that, so that's a role in my life... learning about palm oil and cotton and rubber and wheat and .... Bottomless, endlessly fascinating, and continuing for at least the last 60 years, since Sarawak anyway.
With the realization that this Question was an invitation to pick up /Plantae/ anew, I started a list of books and other sources that I've encountered since I was enticed away by other engagements. The fruits of a morning gambol:
(these need to be organized and commented)The Nature of Plants: An Introduction to How Plants Work Craig N Huegel (Kindle)
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth Zoë Schlanger (Kindle) [see my Kindle Notebook]
Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants Stella Sandford (Kindle)
What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses Daniel Chamovitz
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence James Bridle (Kindle) [see my Kindle Notebook]
The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination Richard Mabey (Kindle) [see my Kindle Notebook]
The Signature of All Things Elizabeth Gilbert (Audible) (and see Barbara Kingsolver's review)
The Kew Plant Glossary: An Illustrated Dictionary of Plant Terms
That's a healthy reading list. Then I became intrigued with Plants in Science Fiction (imaginary plants in Stories, another sort of botanical relationship to humanity)
Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation Jerry Määttä, Katherine E Bishop, David Higgins...the first-ever collected volume on plants in science fiction. Its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life at large; questioning and shifting our understandings of institutions, nations, borders, and boundaries; erecting — and dismantling — new visions of utopian and dystopian futures. (Amazon blurb)Nora Castle's review of Plants in Science Fiction (pdf)
Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction Natania Meeker and Antonia Szabari (Kindle)
The best books on plants in science fiction Picked by Katherine E. Bishop
Fictional plants at fandom.com
List of fictional plants (Wikipedia)
Talking Trees and Killer Spores: The Flora of Science Fiction and Fantasy Ryan Britt at Reactor
Hugo Gernsback's Plant Monsters Dark Worlds Quarterly
❧ ❧
❧ ❧ Real Life Sci-Fi Plants That Look Like They're From A Movie
A Non-History of Plants at MEP ...retraces the visual history of plants through art, technology, and science from the nineteenth century to the present day. (at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris) and Musée (Vanguard of Photography Culture) (some images from the show)
❧ ❧ explore Betsy's galleries at brootphoto.com
my plant photographs of the last few years (thinking about making other plant image galleries too...)
at Central Maine Botanical Gardens
❧ ❧ Karl Blossfeldt's plant photographs
...the camera served only to bring out and reproduce minute plant details that had hitherto been ignored owing to their size....it was often the plants generally and unjustly denigrated as weeds whose forms fascinated him most.
...natural aging, wilting and drying out are all included in Blossfeldt's plant universe.
...By the time Blossfeldt was publicly acclaimed in 1928, the ideas [of form. etc.] he had championed for 30 years were largely outmoded.
...he stuck to a single, tried-and-tested concept —the successful formula in photography: to produce clear-sharp images of concrete objects, plausible details of physical reality... governed by a rigid and eternla law emanating from beyond this Earth... a relationship between art and nature never heretofore represented with such startling immediacy.
Some of Joyce Tenneson's flower portraits are in the same vein, especially in Flower Portraits: The Life Cycle of Beauty
❧ ❧ Curious Stillness of Autumn Andy Ilachinski
quotes Richard Addams, Watership Down:
Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man's beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.
❧ ❧ Maria Popova's Marginalian has many posts in Plantae territory:
Search Results for "Plants" The Marginalian
Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms: Atkins, AnnaEmily Dickinson's Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry The Marginalian
Emily Dickinson's Herbarium: A Facsimile Edition $3999.99
The Gardens of Emily Dickinson Judith Farr
Stunning Drawings of Seaweed from a Book by Self-Taught Victorian Marine Biologist Margaret Gatty The Marginalian
Gardening and the Secret of Happiness Braiding Sweetgrass The Marginalian
The Magic of Moss and What It Teaches Us About the Art of Attentiveness to Life at All Scales Gathering Moss The Marginalian